Getting at the Author: Reimagining Books and Reading in the Age of American Realism (review)

How, asks Barbara Hochman, did the author became such a contested element of print culture in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries? What did the often uneasy coexistence of various definitions of the author imply about how readers understood the value of books and the meaning of reading itself? Hochman's inquiry into authorship is situated at an interdisciplinary intersection, drawing on reception history as well as the tension between artifact and text that drives the emerging field of the history of the book. Analyzing a small number of texts from the turn of the twentieth century, the period in which she maintains that writing and publishing assumed something like their current professional shape, Hochman's work differentiates itself from similar studies because it turns its attention away from the rise of the author as celebrity or as the sign of distinction. Instead, Hochman pays close attention to readers' resistance to new definitions of the author. That resistance, she argues, demonstrates that literary history, far from being a progression away from the sentimental idea of the intrusive author—the author as moral guide and friend to the reader—has continually struggled with how to imagine the relationship between readers and writers. The parameters of that struggle are defined by the various kinds of literature produced during the "age of realism" as well as by the narrative strategies of novelists who at first sight appear to be emblems of realist writing's endorsement of the remote or impersonal author. Hochman examines popular and realist writing, looking in each instance at how texts stage within themselves scenes of reading and writing, as well as how they represent the "author." She identifies a number of concerns underwriting the rethinking of the author-reader relation: cultural anxiety about women on display or on stage, anxiety about the saturation of culture by markets, and middle-class anxiety about alienation in a market culture.

Getting at the Author is engagingly and concisely written, and although it deals with only a few texts, its endnotes are a treasure trove of readings of other cultural texts. The book has many strengths, but I shall note only two. First, Hochman sets the stage for further inquiries into the ways in which books were used by various readers, as well as how the publishing industry began to recognize and respond to the different demands that readers brought to books. Second, Hochman gives us a way to understand that the concern with the death of the author is hardly theoretical—rather, it was a historical debate that continues to structure the way books are received and produced. Hochman's study will be of most use alongside cultural histories of editing and publishing houses, or of journalism and magazine writing, and it provides solid historical and cultural background to larger questions of canonization that attend disciplinary discussions of readers and authors.