The Reception of Jane Austen and Walter Scott: A Comparative Longitudinal Study (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780826495464)

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
ISBN-10: 082649546X
ISBN-13: 9780826495464
Publisher: Continnuum-3PL
Language: English
Published: 08/09/2007
Pages: 208
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.43w x 0.82d

Review Citation(s):
Reference and Research Bk News 05/01/2008 pg. 336