In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Editors' Introduction
  • Amy L. Blair and James L. Machor

Quite remarkably, we find ourselves celebrating the tenth anniversary of Reception's inception with this 2018 issue. It seems as if hardly any time has passed since the meeting at the University of Delaware in the summer of 2005, when Philip Goldstein and James Machor founded the Reception Study Society, and even less since the first volume of Reception came out in Fall 2008 in the journal's original online format. The field of reception study has grown remarkably since then, both in the United States and internationally, and looking back on ten years of Reception we are excited to see how much of that change we have been able to register and contribute to in these pages.

This tenth issue is also our third special-topic issue, under the guest editorship of Janet Badia and Steven Carr, both of Indiana University–Purdue University Fort Wayne. This issue centers on reception across borders—borders in the political, ideological, and temporal senses. To some degree, one might argue that any moment of reception involves a transaction that crosses borders, of course. If we define the work of reception studies, at the heart of the field, as marking and accounting for the way texts "happen" when they are received by audiences, we acknowledge that boundaries between text and audience are variously crossed in moments of reception. Reception studies describes the trajectory through which the borders are crossed and the conditions of possibility of the crossings.

Perhaps, then, we should go a step further to characterize the work in this issue as a group of comparative reception studies. As Badia and Carr note in their guest editors' introduction, the essays in this [End Page 1] volume offer four snapshots of "how, as texts move between cultures, between diverse readers, across platforms and genres, and across literary periods, their reception highlights the shape-shifting nature of borders." Each of these essays looks at multiple readerships' "horizons of expectations" or describes multiple "interpretive communities" for each text or set of texts examined. Shakespeare by way of "Quality Television" does different political and cultural work in twenty-first-century Britain than it does when transmitted to television screens in the United States, and both receptions are distinct from those of earlier filmic interpretations of the history plays. Kipling's "The White Man's Burden" speaks to the twenty-first-century's so-called "alt-right" online community, despite their isolationist, not imperialist, predilections. Jane Austen's novels and The Godfather films resonate with myriad unexpected audiences in structurally similar ways, and these border crossings allow for the imagined dissolution of other borders, between high and low culture or between persons who divisive politicians would insist should be incomprehensible to each other.

It is worth noting that many of the texts discussed here become available to their various audiences through the workings of transnational capital. Reception studies has not always been as keenly attuned as it could, and perhaps should, be, to the ways cross-border receptions facilitate narratives of utopic globalism. This is one challenge posed by these collected essays; among many others, it is one that Reception will heartily accept as we move into our second decade of publication.

In the meantime, this issue's book review section, beginning on page 96, offers our usual coverage of new books in reception studies from a variety of fields and disciplines. Books in literary criticism that examine their subjects through the lens of reception studies are Devoney Looser's The Making of Jane Austen, reviewed by Sarah Wootton, and Jesse Rosenthal's Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel, reviewed by Beth Palmer. Readers interested in new work in the history of the book and the history of reading can turn to Stacy Erickson-Pesetski's review of Abigail Williams' The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home. Nearly half of the reviews in this issue examine and evaluate books in which reception studies and cultural and media studies intersect. These include Rhiannon Bury's review of Spectatorship: Shifting Theories of Gender, Sexuality, and Media edited by Roxanne Samer and William Whittington...

pdf

Share