New Publication:
The Reception of Jane Austen and Walter Scott
A Comparative Longitudinal Study
Annika Bautz
Pub Date: 9 Jun 2007
ISBN: 082649546X
hardcover
208 Pages
£60.00
Series: Continuum Reception Studies
Subject: Comparative Literature and Literary Studies
Imprint: Continuum
Description
Of all the great novelists of the Romantic period, only two, Jane Austen and
Walter Scott, have been continuously reprinted, admired, argued about, and
read, from the moment their works first appeared until the present day. In
a pioneering study, Annika Bautz traces how Scott's nineteenth-century
success among all classes of readers made him the most admired and most
widely read novelist in history, only for his readership to plummet sharply
downwards in the twentieth century. Austen's popularity, by contrast, has
risen inexorably, overtaking Scott's, and bringing about a reversal in
reputation that would have been unthinkable in the authors' own time.
To assess the reactions of readers belonging to diverse interpretative
communities, Bautz draws on a wide range of indicators, including editions,
publisher's relaunches, sales, reviews, library catalogues and lending
figures, private comments in diaries and letters, popularisations. She maps
out the long-run changes in the reception of each author over two centuries,
explaining literary tastes and their determinants, and illuminating the
broader culture of the successive reading audiences who gave both authors
their uninterrupted loyalty.
The first ever comparative longitudinal study, firmly based on empirical and
archival evidence, this book will be of interest to scholars in Romanticism,
Victorianism, book history, reading and reception studies, and cultural
history.
Author
Annika Bautz is Teaching Fellow in English at the University of Keele.
Reviews
"This lively and perceptive book takes a comparative approach to the study
of the reception of literary works. It traces the popularity of the novels
of Jane Austen and Walter Scott from publication in the early nineteenth
century to the present, mapping its trajectories and cross-over points. The
study aims to capture the response of the reading public, rather than
individual readers, and does so through the study of reviews, letters,
editions, library-holdings, newspaper articles, films of the novels and
introductions to paperback editions. The results shed light on experiences
of reading over two hundred years, and ask not only which author was more
popular at any period, but also why. Annika Bautz has an enviable ability to
combine scholarship with a fresh and lucid style, and the details of
publishing history with astute analyses of changing reader attitudes."
Professor Claire Lamont, Newcastle University
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