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.

Philip Goldstein is fast establishing himself as the doyen of "reception study," a discipline that assumes that the reader's interpretive practices explain a text's import. In his latest work, Communities of Cultural Value, Goldstein delves again into the realm of literary criticism, painting an absorbing picture of the changing nature of a growing, more diversified readership and its challenge to professional literary study. Goldstein's PostMarxist approach investigates how interpretive communities govern the reader's practices, through lucid case studies that analyze the reception of texts...

Poststructuralist Marxism, or post-Marxism, is a theoretical viewpoint that elaborates and revises the work of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault. Unlike traditional Marxism, which emphasizes the priority of class struggle and the common humanity of oppressed groups, post-Marxism reveals the sexual, racial, class, and ethnic divisions of modern Western society. This book surveys the different versions of post-Marxist theory: the economic theory of Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff, the historical methodology of Michel Foucault, the political theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, the...

Contemporary reception study has developed a diversity of approaches and methods, including the institutional, textual, historical, authorial, and reader-response, which, to a greater or lesser extent, acknowledge the various ways in which readers have found texts-- literature, television shows, movies, and newspapers--meaningful. This collection emphasizes that new diversity, examining movies, newspapers, fans, television shows, and traditional American as well as modern Hispanic, Black, and Women's literature. The essays on literature include James Machor on Melville's short fiction,...

Contemporary reception study has developed a diversity of approaches and methods, including the institutional, textual, historical, authorial, and reader-response, which, to a greater or lesser extent, acknowledge the various ways in which readers have found texts-- literature, television shows, movies, and newspapers--meaningful. This collection emphasizes that new diversity, examining movies, newspapers, fans, television shows, and traditional American as well as modern Hispanic, Black, and Women's literature. The essays on literature include James Machor on Melville's short fiction,...