James L. Machor is a professor of English at Kansas State University, editor of Readers in History: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Contexts of Response, also published by Johns Hopkins, and coeditor of Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies and New Directions in American Reception Study.

Presents a number of important Americanist scholars doing substantial and thought-provoking work. These scholars rethink responses to canonical works and come to important new undertsandings of women's and African American writing. -- John Evelev Nineteenth-Century Prose Presents a number of important Americanist scholars doing substantial and thought-provoking work. These scholars rethink responses to canonical works and come to important new undertsandings of women's and African American writing... Readers in History suggests that new attention to the social dynamics of reading will generate important new understandings of nineteenth-century American literature. -- John Evelev Nineteenth-Century Pros

• Introduction: Readers/Texts/ContextsPart I: Theory and the Historicizing of Reading PracticesChapter 1. Misreading as a Historical Act: Cultural Rhetoric, Bible Politics, and Fuller's 1845 Review of Douglass's NarrativeChapter 2. Sweet Away: Henry James, Margaret Fuller, and "The Last of the Valerii"Chapter 3. Historical Hermeneutics and Antebellum Fiction: Gender, Response Theory, and Interpretive ContextsChapter 4. Feminism, New Historicism, and the ReaderPart II: Reading Communities and the Contexts of Inscribed AudienceChapter 5. Cooper's Allegories of Reading and "the Wreck of the Past"Chapter 6. The Address of The Scarlet LetterChapter 7. Poetry Readers and Reading in the 1890s: Emily Dickinson's First Reception Chapter 8. Probable Readers, Possible Stories: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Black NarrativePart III: Reading and Writing Against the Grain: Race, Gender, and ResponseChapter 9. Uncle Tom's Cabin and Antebellum Black Response Chapter 10. Reading Before Marx: Margaret Fuller and the New-York Daily TribuneChapter 11. Responding to the Text(s): Women Readers and the Quest for Higher EducationNotes on Contributors