the garden city in america: crevecoeur's letters and the urban-pastoral context

the garden city in america: crevecoeur's letters and the urban-pastoral contex

Reading Fiction in Antebellum America

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

Black November (2012) and its social-change potential: reactions from the audience

This article examines, through multiple film screenings and Focus Group Discussions, the potential of Black November (2012) to initiate social change in the 20th anniversary of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s death. Current research on African film is skewed towards broad representations of urban and rural lives, thus making the reception of indigenous popular films an understudied area. Virtually absent in African film scholarship is the reception of the films as agents of potential social change. The nexus between popular films and social change is examined here in the aftermath of failed formalized processes of conflict resolution. Recent popular film reception studies (Krings and Okome, 2013) have transnational foci, which focus on African emigrants’ conditions of life in foreign localities. The paper, therefore, evaluates the impact of popular films on viewers and how they interpret the film as being instrumental in changing oppressive situations in the Niger Delta. It deploys the theory that the arts function as peace-builders and tools for social change among conflicting parties (Shank & Schirch, 2008) in the light of the Niger Delta struggles, particularly those championed by Ken Saro-Wiwa, which are revisited two decades after his internationally-condemned murder. Findings include that Black November cannot function in isolation to produce social change but must work within a broad framework of strategies serving the same goal. // Cet article examine, à travers différentes projections de film et des Groupes de discussion thématiques, le potentiel de Black November (2012) pour initier un changement social au 20ème anniversaire de la mort de Ken Saro-Wiwa. La recherche actuelle sur le film africain est biaisée se concentrant sur des représentations larges des vies urbaines et rurales, si bien que la réception de films populaires autochtones est un domaine sous étudié. La façon dont les films potentiels agents de changement social sont reçus est virtuellement absente comme thème de la recherche sur les films africains. Le lien entre les films populaires et le changement social est examiné ici suite à l’échec de processus formalisés de résolution de conflit. Des études récentes se penchent sur la réception des films cette attention est transnationale. Ces études se concentrent sur les conditions de vie des émigrés africains dans des régions étrangères. L’article évalue par conséquent l’impact des films populaires sur les spectateurs, la façon dont le film est interprété, et son caractère instrumental pour modifier des situations d’oppression dans le Delta du Niger. La théorie qu’il déploie est que les arts fonctionnent comme des constructeurs de paix et des outils de changement social parmi des parties en conflit à la lumière des luttes dans le Delta du Niger, en particulier celle défendue par Ken Saro-Wiwa, qui sont revisitées une vingtaine d’années après son meurtre internationalement dénoncé. On a découvert que Black November ne peut pas fonctionner de façon isolée pour produire un changement social mais doit fonctionner dans un cadre plus vaste de stratégies visant le même objectif

The touring reader: understanding the bibliophile's experience of literary tourism

This research explores the literary enthusiast’s experience of planning and undertaking literary inspired trips. The research reconceptualises the dominant figure of the literary pilgrim, inspired to visit sites associated with favourite authors, by using detailed results from 30 open-ended surveys distributed to delegates at a literary conference. The findings indicate that these keen readers prefer to plan their own trips and shun organised attractions and mainstream tourist information in favour of employing the texts themselves as source material. Respondents then feed back their experiences into the re-reading of the literary text. These findings are analysed using the concept of concretisation borrowed from literary theory. This concept, which has not been used in previous tourist studies, reflects the experience of these visitors who are using travel to solidify their reading of favourite books. This research therefore highlights the interdependence of texts and travels and emphasises the important role that imagination plays in the experience and recollection of tourist trips