Reception by Ika Willis (review)

Ika Willis's Reception is a part of Routledge's New Critical Idiom Series, consisting of introductory books designed to "provide clear, well-illustrated accounts of the full range of terminology currently in use, and to evolve histories of its changing usage" (Series Editor's Preface, viii). The other books in the series (e.g., Myth, Science Fiction, The Postmodern) focus on literary terms that have been the subject of earlier introductory guides, but to my knowledge, Willis's book is the first (and only) volume offering a clear, comprehensive overview and analysis of the field of reception studies. Its accessibility makes it suitable for undergraduate courses, and its sophistication and comprehensiveness make it an excellent text for a graduate course as well as a useful resource for scholars and critics looking for more details about the history and nature of reception studies.

The term "reception" can apply to a broad range of theoretical, critical, and historical work on the relationship of readers and audiences to visual, audio, or verbal texts. Willis draws on work in media and cultural studies, but she places her primary emphasis on reception in the context of literary studies—that is, on the practice of reading and analyzing literary texts.

Willis covers three areas linked to the current usage of the term: "reception study, which analyses how readers and audiences interpret and use texts; reception history, which tracks the afterlife of texts and/or investigates the history of reading and the history of books; and reception theory, which explores the nature of interpretation, language and meaning itself" (1). Her aim is to "sketch out a reception-informed critical practice which takes account of the intertwined relationship between texts and their interpreters, readers or receivers" (1). Of course, if truth be told, criticism and literary scholarship are nothing if not reception. Willis's book aims to inform us of the cognitive and affective activities and processes inherent to our work.

The book contains an introduction, four chapters devoted to "Rewriting," "Readers," "Reading," and "Meaning," and a brief conclusion. The introduction alone is worth the price of the book. It would serve well as required reading for all graduate students. Before she discusses "The Birth of the Reader: 1960–1990," Willis wisely gives us three "Prehistories of Reception" in Classical, Medieval, and Early Modern Studies, in Modernity (1700–1900), and during the period of the consolidation of academic literary criticism in the first half of the twentieth century. These prehistories remind us of the centrality of the audience or the reader to the critical debates of these earlier periods. Both Plato and Aristotle evaluated poetry in terms of its emotional impact: generally harmful to public morality says the former, generally beneficial says the latter. The Latin poet Horace said that the function of poetry is to "instruct and delight," and this idea was echoed by Sydney in the Renaissance and by Dryden in the seventeenth century. The eighteenth century marks a major transition from oral to print culture, resulting in the spread and eventual dominance of silent reading, the massive increase in the supply of reading material, the reciprocal increase in the number of readers consuming that supply, and the development of cultural, material, and social structures needed to promote and sustain these changes. In the space of three pages, Willis manages a cogent discussion of the significant processes associated with the transition from oral to print culture: the privatization and intensification of reading, the connection of these changes to large-scale social movements (capitalism, the Reformation, and colonization), the transformation of concepts of creativity and authorship, the rise of copyright laws, and the race, class, and gender implications of all these changes.

After discussing two central moments in academic criticism from 1920 to 1960—Russian Formalism and Prague Structuralism and then the New Criticism—which pushed the reader to the sidelines in favor of concentrated attention to the properties of the text as an autonomous art object, Willis turns to the birth (actually re-birth) of the...