The Reader-Brand: Tolstoy in England at the Turn of the Century

Tolstoy’s popularity in England began with the appearance of English and French translations of Anna Karenina and War and Peace in 1887. From the late 1880s until his death in 1910 he was not only a prominent author but also a well-known public figure whose religious pronouncements and arguments with the church and the government were detailed in articles in the Times. In spite of his high profile during these decades, however, his works sometimes needed help finding an audience. In the 1880s and 1910s, lulls in Tolstoy’s popularity caused publishers to repackage his books in various attempts to attract new readers. These moments provide us with an opportunity for studying the figures deployed in the world of print culture that interpellate consumers into readers—what I am calling the reader-brand.

Recent criticism has discussed the importance of the author-brand to literary culture; I am introducing the term “reader-brand” in order to understand reading as an interaction between markets and readers that shapes both individual choices and historical and cultural trends. The “reader-brand” refers to the figures of “the reader” that circulate in criticisms, reviews, and advertisements and that shape readers’ identity and expectations before reading. These are fictions of the reader that nonetheless work to attract actual readers. I argue that in choosing a text, the reader is interpellated by a brand image of the reader that has been constructed by the world of print culture. As part of this process, I hypothesize that the reader must at some point internalize a personal reader-brand—his or her own conception of which books should be owned and which borrowed, which displayed and which merely consumed. In general, the reader chooses a book when the reader-brand developed around a particular text, author, series, or journal matches his or her internal image of himself or herself as a reader. In order to function in the market, the brands must be familiar to all consumers. While most brand names achieve familiarity simply through repetition, reader-brands are organized around recognizable identifications: for example, the woman reader, the English reader, the romance reader, the educated reader. As I will argue, these identifications do not merely reflect existing, fixed identities: print culture can produce aspirational reader-brands, so that the familiarity of the brand can actually allow the reader to take on an identity-in-formation, a process of becoming, that invites him or her to reach beyond his or her class status. By introducing the term “brand” into a discussion of readers, I hope to suggest that in choosing a book, readers respond not to the particularity of a novel which, after all, they have not read, but to an identity that is iterable. I am arguing that the constructions of readers that develop in print culture are attempts at interpellation that can succeed or fail; in focusing on the ability of the individual to be interpellated or not, to mobilize different reading identities in any moment of selection, I theorize a reader whose identity is constantly in process, informed both by the social world and by personal experience.

Literary and cultural critics have a strong tendency to value the foreign over the familiar. In Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, Haun Saussy writes, “A translation always brings across most successfully the aspects of a work for which its audience is already prepared; but what is most worth knowing may be what requires the most strenuous and imaginative adaptation.”¹ In critiquing the entire practice of translation, Saussy not only validates unfamiliar content as “what is worth knowing” but also implies that valuable knowledge can only be obtained through the unfamiliar language. This preference for unfamiliar language extends to academic prose, as indicated by Judith Butler’s response to her “Bad Writing” prize, in which she writes that “scholars are obliged to . . . provoke new ways of looking at a familiar world” and quotes Herbert Marcuse’s observation that the intellectual appears to talk “like a foreigner.”² As Butler suggests, the terms “familiar” and “unfamiliar” often...