What has the city meant to Americans? James L. Machor explores this question in a provocative analysis of American responses to urbanization in the context of the culture s tendency to valorize nature and the rural world.
Although much attention has been paid to American rural-urban relations, Machor focuses on a dimension largely overlooked by those seeking to explain American conceptions of the city. While urban historians and literary critics have explicitly or implicitly emphasized the opposition between urban and rural sensibilities in America, an equally important feature of...

Reception study is an important tool for understanding how readers encounter texts and absorb information. This up-to-date selection of the most important published work lays out the principles of reception study and its major theoreticians, and goes on to show how the method is being widely used in areas as varied as cultural studies, African-American studies, and the burgeoning field called the history of the book. This volume presents the only complete account of reception study today.