The Reception of Jane Austen and Walter Scott: A Comparative Longitudinal Study

Description

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.

ANNIKA BAUTZ is Lecturer in English at the University of Plymouth, UK.

"This lively and perceptive book takes a comparative approach to the study of the reception of literary works. It traces the popularity of the novels of Jane Austen and Walter Scott from publication in the early nineteenth century to the present, mapping its trajectories and cross-over points. The study aims to capture the response of the reading public, rather than individual readers, and does so through the study of reviews, letters, editions, library-holdings, newspaper articles, films of the novels and introductions to paperback editions. The results shed light on experiences of reading over two hundred years, and ask not only which author was more popular at any period, but also why. Annika Bautz has an enviable ability to combine scholarship with a fresh and lucid style, and the details of publishing history with astute analyses of changing reader attitudes." Professor Claire Lamont, Newcastle University -- Professor Claire Lamont, Newcastle University Review in Translation and Literature, 2008. "The information presented in Bautz's study could easily contribute to a studying of changing attitudes towards women as well as towards women authors from the Regency era to the present...The most unique contribution." -James Rovira, College Literature, Vol. 36, April 2009