H05025 HARDY AND HIS READERS BOOK REVIEW- 3/23/05 - HARDY FORUM ARCHIVES ____________________________________________________________________________
From: ROGERS@juniata.edu
Subject: New on the Reviews Page
Date: March 23, 2005 1:01:21 PM PST
Just posted to the Reviews Page is Eugene Davis's review of Hardy and His Readers by T. R. Wright.
This is the second review of this title-the first reviewed by Paul Titschmarsh--and I encourage you to read the two reviews in tandem.
If you are an author or a publisher with a book for review, please contact me at any of the addresses below. Also if you are interested in becoming a reviewer, please also contact me with your specializations/interests and experience. Other media, such as films, are also of interest for review.
The Reviews Page can be accessed via the Members Research Resources pages on TTHA's web site. If you are a member and have forgotten your membership number (required for access) or are interested in becoming a member, please contact Prof. Rosemarie Morgan at rosemarie.morgan@yale.edu
Cheers,
Shannon
Shannon L. Rogers
General Editor
Reviews Page, TTHA
Assistant Professor of History
200 I. Harvey Brumbaugh
Juniata College
1700 Moore Street
Huntingdon, PA 16652
(814) 641-3638
rogers@juniata.edu
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From: Rosemarie.morgan@yale.edu
Subject: Re: New on the Reviews Page
Date: March 23, 2005 4:27:56 PM PST
What an imposing review!
Clearly there is ample room for a fuller study of Hardy and His Readers -- and one that must, surely, take account of Eugene Davis's several thousand entries based on the testimonies of actual readers of Hardy from the 1870s onwards -- to wit, the Gerber -Davis Bibliography.
Inevitably, the G-D Bibliography has presented a daunting prospect to researchers in its massive 2-volume form, but now that it is online and searchable there should be no holds barred!
Thank you Shannon for hosting this most informative Reviews page,
Best,
Rosemarie
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From: T.R.Wright@newcastle.ac.uk
Subject: Hardy and His Readers
Date: March 30, 2005 1:23:05 AM PST
I hope you don't mind my replying to you (and at the same time to Eugene Davis) in the form of an open letter, which may help to clarify a few points about my book, which may not be clear from his review, although you kindly suggest that Eugene's review should be read in tandem with Paul Titschmarsh, who gives a fuller descriptive account of the aims of my book.
It is ironic that Eugene's review of my book appears just after two reviews by Keith Wilson and myself of "Thomas Hardy and Contemporary Literary Studies", edited by Tim Dolin and Peter Widdowson, which both take up their distinction between theoretical and anti-theoretical studies. Keith thinks there is no such distinction but Eugene has confirmed my belief that there is.
For he finds my 'scrupulous...consideration of the shifting sands on which definitions of The Author and The Reader are founded...somewhat tedious'. Yet they are crucial to the whole enterprise. For they, like the focus of my study, is not, as he says, 'easy to define'. Hence my spelling out in the opening chapter as my 'Introductory Questions' (in a book which he over-literally describes as having 'no introduction') four different types of questions (made clear enough for the most anti-theoretical reader, I would have thought, by the titles of the sections): Questions of Reading, Questions of History, Questions of Class and Questions of Gender.
I also find it hard to understand that Eugene should say that I fail to clarify how my approach differs from that of earlier critics who took the same title, "Hardy and His Readers", when my opening chapter spells out on p.2 that Lerner and Holmstrom focussed only on half of Hardy's career (the 'major' novels) and on p.3 that Gibson 'did not have space fully to consider' how Hardy's relationship with his readers 'was mediated by material factors comprising the general literary field within which he had to operate'. Eugene mentions my reference to Gibson, which he calls 'a weak apology'. It's not meant as an apology but a statement of fact: Gibson was writing a short article at a time when 'the history of the book' hadn' been invented.
Just so readers of my book can know what it is about, I should add that the blurb makes it quite clear that I 'attempt to balance historical research into the response of "actual" readers (based on manuscript letters to Hardy and his own scrapbook of reviews) with literary-critical analysis of the "implied" reader inscribed in the novels themselves'. This, I admit, is a tricky task and I leave it to readers of my book to assess how far I have succeeded in it.
As a final gesture of goodwill towards Eugene (even if I don't think he has been fair to my book) I should also admit that I was helped enormously in the enterprise by the invaluable Gerber and Davis volume. We (theoretically-inclined) critics rely on such resources to attempt answers to the kinds of questions we ask. I wish he wouldn't dismiss our speculations as 'tedious'.
Yrs, Terry Wright
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From: Rosemarie.morgan@yale.edu
Subject: Re: Hardy and His Readers
Date: March 30, 2005 3:43:22 AM PST
Much as I enjoyed your book but at the risk of nit-picking, Terry, I would argue, as would Eugene Davis - surely? as the compiler of a few thousand reader-responses in the G-D Bibliography - that the "history of the book" was invented when reviewing and literary criticism began. If Hardy's first reviewers and critics back in the 1870s were not creating literary history, in line with their many predecessors, I'll eat my nits!
Cheers,
Rosemarie
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From: kgwilson@uottawa.ca
Subject: Re: Hardy and His Readers
Date: March 30, 2005 7:42:44 AM PST
Presumably Terry was referring to the recent focus on the history of the book in cultural/theoretical enquiry (hence the quotation marks). In the sense in which he is using it, he is quite right to say that "'the history of the book' hadn't been invented" at the time to which he is referring. Like the analogous focus on 'print culture,' it's been around in the sense in which Terry is using it for, what? -- ten years, perhaps, if that. "Literary history" is a very different thing, and I suspect a thing that begins to have meaningful application as a generic term in the eighteenth century, and one that in any case has little to do with how individual reviewers respond to individual newly published books any more than historiography has to do with how individual news-readers present the news.
I share Terry's sense that what he was attempting to do in this book was very different from what was suggested in the review, and different in a way that makes the invocation of Lerner and Holmstrom or Gibson irrelevant: they were very different kinds of works serving a different purpose from Terry Wright's. Where do they engage with the question of the "implied reader"? Where do they engage with "Questions of Reading, Questions of History, Questions of Class and Questions of Gender"? I think the Davis review is comparing apples and oranges.
Best,
Keith
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From: Rosemarie.morgan@yale.edu
Subject: Re: Hardy and His Readers
Date: March 30, 2005 9:38:27 AM PST
Without embracing "modern" terminologies, Hardy himself engaged with the "implied reader" when he suggested that there is more in a book than the author consciously puts there.
It strikes me as ironic that studies in publication (as at Stirling University) --which include publication history of course -- have appeared relatively recently on the scene at the very point where book publication is contending with, and is sometimes superseded by, electronic publication..
Cheers
Rosemarie
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