This book describes and characterizes responses of American readers to fiction in the generation before the Civil War. It is based on close examination of the reviews of all novels—both American and European—that appeared in major American periodicals during the years 1840–1860, a period in which magazines, novels, and novel reviews all proliferated. Nina Baym makes uses of the reviews to gain information about the formal, aesthetic, and moral expectations of reviewers. He...

There have been signs now, for some time, that poststructuralist hegemony is declining. This book helps us to understand the theoretical flaws that make this decline inevitable.The essays in this volume represent a collective questioning of the poststructuralist ascendancy, and of the assumptions involved therin, by a group of our most prominent scholars. These scholars were charged with examining the truth-value, methodology, practice, and humanistic status of poststructuralist the...