This collection reconsiders and extends reception research in literary studies, book history, and media/cultural studies and marks out new directions for such work by reevaluating its methodologies and by examining not only traditional American literature but also women's, African-American, and multicultural literatures, popular culture, the ordinary reader, and the role of reception in the history of the book.

• Introduction: Reception Study: Achievements and New Directions


• I. (Re)Theorizing Reception Study


• "Understanding an Other: Reading as a Receptive Form of Communicative Action"


• "Judging and Hoping: Rhetorical Effects of Reading about Reading"


• "Activating the Multitude: Audience Powers and Cultural Studies"


• "Habitus Clivé: Aesthetics and Politics in the Work of Pierre Bourdieu"


• II. Texts, Authors, and the Receptions of Literature


• "The American Reception of Melville's Short Fiction in the 1850s"


• "Placing Readers at the Forefront of Nowhere: Reception and Utopian Literature"


• "Richard Wright's Native Son: From Naturalist Protest to Modernist Liberation and Beyond"


• "Main Street Reading Main Street"


• "Learning from Philistines: Suspicion, Refusing to Read,and the Rise of Dubious Modernism"


• "Reception and Authenticity: Danny Santiago's Famous All Over Town"




• III. Books, Print Culture, and Historical Sites of Reception


• "The Power of Recirculation: Scrapbooks and the Reception of the Nineteenth-Century Press"


• "Accuracy or Fair Play? Complaining About Newspapers in Early Twentieth-Century New York"


• "Sentiment without Tears: Uncle Tom's Cabin as History in the 1890s"


• IV. Media and Cultural Studies


• "Kiss Me Deadly: Cold War Threats from Spillane to Aldrich, NY to LA, and the Mafia to the H-Bomb"


• "Textual Poaching or Game Keeping? A Comparative Study of Two Six Feet Under Internet Fan Forums"


• "Political Talk and the Flow of Ambient Television: Women Watching Oprah in an African-American Hair Salon"


• V. Retrospective Prospects


• "What's the Matter with Reception Studies? Some Thoughts on the Disciplinary Origins, Conceptual Restraints, and Persistent Viability of a Paradigm"


• "The Reception Deception"


• "Accuracy or Fair Play? Complaining


• About Newspapers in Early Twentieth-Century New York"




• Tom's Cabin as History in the 1890s"


• IV. Media and Cultural Studies


• "Kiss Me Deadly: Cold War Threatsfrom Spillane to Aldrich, NY to LA, and the Mafia to the H-Bomb"


• H-Bomb"