American Reception Study

Contemporary reception study has developed a diversity of approaches andmethods, including the institutional, textual, historical, authorial, andreader-response, which, to a greater or lesser extent, acknowledge the variousways in which readers have found texts-- literature, television shows, movies,and newspapers--meaningful. This collection emphasizes that new diversity,examining movies, newspapers, fans, television shows, and traditional Americanas well as modern Hispanic, Black, and Women's literature. The essays onliterature include James Machor on Melville's short fiction, Kenneth Roemer onEdward Bellamy's utopian work Looking Backward, Amy Blair on the popularity ofSinclair Lewis's Main Street, Marcial Gonzalez on Danny Santiago and hisHispanic novel Famous All Over Town, and Leonard Diepeveen on modernist fictionand criticism. The theoretical essays on reader-oriented criticism include PatsySchweickart on interpretation and the ethics of careand Jack Bratich on activeaudiences. Media versions of response criticism include Andrea Press and CamilleJohnson's ethnographic analysis of fans of the Oprah Winfrey Show, Janet Staigeron Robert Aldrich's film version of Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me Deadly, andRhiannon Bury on the fans of the HBO television show Six Feet Under.History-of-the-book versions include Barbara Hochman on the popularity of the1890s editions of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Ellen Garvey onnineteenth-century scrapbooks of newspaper, and David Nord on earlytwentieth-century newspapers' relations to audience charges of bias andunfairness. Poststructuralist studies include Philip Goldstein on RichardWright's Native Son, Steve Mailloux on Reading Lolita in Tehran, and TonyBennett on the cultural analyses of Pierre Bourdieu. The collection concludeswith essays by Janice Radway on the limits of these methods and on thepossibility of new forms of sociological and anthropological reception study andbyToby Miller on the "reception deception" in relation to the worldwidedistribution and reception of movies and television shows.Goldstein, Philip is the author of 'American Reception Study', published 2007 under ISBN 9780195320886 and ISBN 0195320883.