Writing and Reception in Antebellum America

R E V I E W Writing and Reception in Antebellum America James L. Machor. Reading Fiction in Antebellum America: Informed Response and Reception Histories, 1820–1865. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2011. 424 pp. $75.00 cloth. I n this latest of his publications, James L. Machor, Professor of English at Kansas State University, builds upon his previous research on nineteenthcentury American literature, readers, and reception theory—Readers in History: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Contexts of Response (1993), Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies (2000), and New Directions in American Reception Study (2008). As its title announces, Machor’s new study examines ways in which readers received, read, and interpreted works of antebellum American fiction. In doing so, the study considers what it meant to be an “informed reader” of literature during a historical period distinguished by the prominence of literary magazines, and it explores the implications of reception theory, including “historical hermeneutics,” in its detailed treatments of the works and literary historical contexts of four representative, but not equally well-known, American authors: Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Catharine Sedgwick, and Caroline Chesebro’. The book, which is written for an academic audience at the graduate level or above, gives as much attention to reception theory as it does to the critical analysis of the works, their contemporary reception, and their interpretation in the antebellum era and later. Machor aims to elucidate the complex relationship of the authors with their reading public, and the reading strategies and practices that inform and influence our own readings of those authors and their audience. Machor divides his study into two major sections. Part 1 defines and explores the significance of “historical hermeneutics,” reception theory, and conventions of reading in antebellum America as well as prevailing interpretive strategies that constitute what Machor calls “informed reading” during the period. Part 2 applies the theoretical and critical approaches enumerated in part 1 to the works of Poe, Melville, Sedgwick, and Chesebro’, taking into account the critical reception of those authors’ works as well as their responses to published reviews of their works. The book closes with a consideration of the ongoing implications of reception studies, especially “historical hermeneutics,” with respect to current approaches to genre theory and nineteenth-century American literary history. C  2012 Washington State University P O E S T U D I E S , VOL. 44, 2011 101 R E V I E W Noting that “reading is not only a private act but also an intersubjective , social practice” [3], Machor begins by making the case for a “historical hermeneutics,” or theory of interpretation, capable of “reconstruct[ing] the shared patterns of interpretation for a specific historical era to define the reading formation of particular interpretive communities” [7]. He takes great pains throughout his study to avoid relying on any kind of “textual essentialism ” [9] while applying a historical hermeneutical approach to texts, authors, and audiences—examining what is “interpreted” and what is “theorized.” Machor’s reading considers the modes of literary production, the means of literary dissemination, the practices of the authors, and the expectations of the reading public, among other factors, in order to illustrate the intersubjectivity of reading in antebellum America. One of the most interesting issues explored in part 1 is the way in which the “intersection of periodical reviews, public interpretation, and middle-class reading constituted an important context not only for the reading of fiction but also for its production” [32]. In this light, Machor focuses on Poe, who maintained that many contemporary readers derived their “opinions” about fiction from “the journals of the day” [32]. Given that perception, neither Poe nor his fellow writers could ignore this community of readers or the “opinions” that informed and influenced its reading . Calling attention to Poe’s membership in the community of “magazinists” as a reviewer himself, Machor discusses the ways in which Poe adapted his work simultaneously to accommodate and to disrupt readers’ expectations in a power play between author and audience. Because of Poe’s role as fiction writer and literary critic, his prominence in this study makes perfect sense, as does the inclusion of Melville, whose canonical status was in...