Peopled with literary figures such as Tennyson, Trollope, Browning, George Eliot, Henry James and Virginia Woolf, this book provides Anne Thackeray Ritchie's complete journals written in 1864-65 and 1878, an ample selection of her most interesting letters and a number of significant letters written to her. Because only a third of each journal has been previously published, this collection presents a valuable document of Ritchie's inner life, especially the account of her response to her father's death.

James L. Machor offers a sweeping exploration of how American fiction was received in both public and private spheres in the United States before the Civil War. Machor takes four antebellum authors—Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Catharine Sedgwick, and Caroline Chesebro'—and analyzes how their works were published, received, and interpreted. Drawing on discussions found in book reviews and in private letters and diaries, Machor examines how middle-class readers of the time engaged with contemporary fiction and how fiction reading evolved as an interpretative practice in nineteenth-century America. Through careful analysis, Machor illuminates how the reading practices of nineteenth-century Americans shaped not only the experiences of these writers at the time but also the way the writers were received in the twentieth century. What Machor reveals is that these authors were received in ways strikingly different from how they are currently read, thereby shedding significant light on their present status in the literary canon in comparison to their critical and popular positions in their own time. Machor deftly combines response and reception criticism and theory with work in the history of reading to engage with groundbreaking scholarship in historical hermeneutics. In so doing, Machor takes us ever closer to understanding the particular and varying reading strategies of historical audiences and how they impacted authors’ conceptions of their own readership.

Includes the proceedings of the Society.

Over 25 years ago, Raymond Williams’ Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society set the standard for how we understand and use the language of culture and society. Now, three luminaries in the field of cultural studies have assembled a volume that builds on and updates Williams’ classic, reflecting the transformation in culture and society since its publication. New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society is a state-of-the-art reference for students, teachers and culture vultures everywhere. Assembles a stellar team of internationally renowned and interdisciplinary social thinkers and theorists Showcases 142 signed entries – from art, commodity, and fundamentalism to youth, utopia, the virtual, and the West – that capture the practices, institutions, and debates of contemporary society Builds on and updates Raymond Williams’s classic Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, by reflecting the transformation in culture and society over the last 25 years Includes a bibliographic resource to guide research and cross-referencing The book is supported by a website: www.blackwellpublishing.com/newkeywords.