Description: This book describes and characterizes responses of American readers to fiction in the generation before the Civil War. It is based on close examination of the reviews of all novels--both American and European--that appeared in major American periodicals during the years 1840-1860, a period in which magazines, novels, and novel reviews all...
Brief description: Nina Baym is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Feminism and American Literary History: Essays, Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927, and American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790-1860.
Review Quotes:
Baym's chapters on plot and on character validate the importance of the kind of work she has done--and her acuity as a critic. Novels, Readers, and Reviewers is a fresh and exciting contribution to our understanding of the criticism and the sociology of narrative in the nineteenth century. It is a book of sovereign insights, richly earned.
--Terence Martin "American Literature"