What do you think?
Rate this book
Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America
This book describes and characterizes responses of American readers to fiction in the generation before the Civil War. It is based on close examination of the reviews of all novels―both American and European―that appeared in major American periodicals during the years 1840–1860, a period in which magazines, novels, and novel reviews all proliferated. Nina Baym makes uses of the reviews to gain information about the formal, aesthetic, and moral expectations of reviewers. Her major conclusion is that the accepted view about the American novel before the Civil War―the view that the atmosphere in America was hostile to fiction―is a myth. There is compelling evidence, she shows, for the existence of a veritable novel industry and, concomitantly, a vast audience for fiction in the 1840s and 1850s.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 1984
About the author
Nina Baym
39 books17 followersNina Baym (born 1936) was an American literary critic and literary historian. She is best known as the General Editor of the renowned The Norton Anthology of American Literature, from 1991 - 2018. She was professor of English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for over 40 years, from 1963 to 2004.
Baym was a scholar who asked why so few women were represented in the American literary canon, and subsequently spent her career working to correct that imbalance.
While teaching as English professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1975, Baym was writing a book about Nathaniel Hawthorne when she began to wonder why 19th-Century American literature was so male-dominated.
It was Hawthorne himself who helped pique her curiosity: in 1855, he had famously complained that "a damned mob of scribbling women" was cutting into his sales.
“I wanted to know where these women were,” she recalled in an interview with The New York Times in 1987.
She went searching through library bookshelves and 19th-century newspapers and magazines, looking for information about the absent women writers. She found plenty of novels written by women in the 1800's, and though they varied in quality, she concluded that many deserved more than obscurity.
Baym went on to author and edit of a number of groundbreaking works of American literary history and criticism, beginning with Woman's Fiction (1978), and including Feminism and American Literary History (1992), American Women Writers and the Work of History (1995), and American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences (2004).
Elaine Showalter called Baym's Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927 (2011), "The first comprehensive guide to women's writing in the old West," and proclaimed it an "immediately standard and classic text."
The book uncovers and describes the western-themed writing in diverse genres of almost 350 American women, most of them unknown today, but many of them successful and influential in their own time.
Baym was active in many professional associations, such as the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association and the American Studies Association, as well as serving as Director of the School of Humanities at the University of Illinois from 1976-1987. She served on panels for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Fulbight Foundation.
Among her numerous literary prizes, fellowship, and honors are the 2000 Jay B. Hubbell Award for lifetime achievement in American literary studies (from the Modern Language Association) and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Association of University Women, and the Mellon Foundation.
Baym was born in Princeton, New Jersey in 1936; her father was the eminent mathematician Leo Zippin, and her mother was an English teacher. She received her B.A. from Cornell University, an M.A. from Radcliffe, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
She died in 1971.
Baym was a scholar who asked why so few women were represented in the American literary canon, and subsequently spent her career working to correct that imbalance.
While teaching as English professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1975, Baym was writing a book about Nathaniel Hawthorne when she began to wonder why 19th-Century American literature was so male-dominated.
It was Hawthorne himself who helped pique her curiosity: in 1855, he had famously complained that "a damned mob of scribbling women" was cutting into his sales.
“I wanted to know where these women were,” she recalled in an interview with The New York Times in 1987.
She went searching through library bookshelves and 19th-century newspapers and magazines, looking for information about the absent women writers. She found plenty of novels written by women in the 1800's, and though they varied in quality, she concluded that many deserved more than obscurity.
Baym went on to author and edit of a number of groundbreaking works of American literary history and criticism, beginning with Woman's Fiction (1978), and including Feminism and American Literary History (1992), American Women Writers and the Work of History (1995), and American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences (2004).
Elaine Showalter called Baym's Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927 (2011), "The first comprehensive guide to women's writing in the old West," and proclaimed it an "immediately standard and classic text."
The book uncovers and describes the western-themed writing in diverse genres of almost 350 American women, most of them unknown today, but many of them successful and influential in their own time.
Baym was active in many professional associations, such as the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association and the American Studies Association, as well as serving as Director of the School of Humanities at the University of Illinois from 1976-1987. She served on panels for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Fulbight Foundation.
Among her numerous literary prizes, fellowship, and honors are the 2000 Jay B. Hubbell Award for lifetime achievement in American literary studies (from the Modern Language Association) and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Association of University Women, and the Mellon Foundation.
Baym was born in Princeton, New Jersey in 1936; her father was the eminent mathematician Leo Zippin, and her mother was an English teacher. She received her B.A. from Cornell University, an M.A. from Radcliffe, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
She died in 1971.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 29, 2024
I just love Nina Baym, and Novels, Readers, and Reviewers is a fascinating study of reviews of novels in American periodicals from 1830-1860. Baym demonstrates that the antebellum US had a strong appetite for fiction and explores the contours of public opinion via (mostly anonymous) reviews. Want to know what prim 1840s readers thought of George Sand? What, exactly, was the critical response to Moby-dick? Gasping for the tea on the male-or-female-author debate on the Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell novels? It's all here, and more. I couldn't help but smile at how little reading culture and discourse has changed in nearly 200 years.
This period of novel-writing (and reading, and reviewing) was crucial to literary history, and I felt like I was watching it happen. Many of the journals were familiar to me from reading period literature (Godey's, Sartain's) while others are still around (Harper's, The Atlantic). Most reviewers were anonymous, but Baym occasionally names reviewers, such as Edgar Allan Poe of Graham's. Baym has a particular interest in refuting the prevailing (in the 1980s) academic claim that antebellum America frowned upon fiction. Highly amusing for me, she probes and dissects views on US fiction that Nathaniel Hawthorne made, which are easily disproved by his own day, but were accepted by later critics. Honestly, the Hawthorne discourse is worth the read alone!
Nearly forty years after its publication, this book is in some places a period piece, but always a delightful one, and timelessly worthy of Baym's incredible study. She must have read every book review in every periodical (she focuses on twenty-one periodicals!) from that era that she could find, in the days of the microfiche and physical copies with their tiny, faded newsprint. What a scholar! Periodicals are so underrated in American scholarship and having a book focusing on them entirely is a real treat. I didn't know if this study could live up to Woman's Fiction, but it did! And now I want to read that one again...
This period of novel-writing (and reading, and reviewing) was crucial to literary history, and I felt like I was watching it happen. Many of the journals were familiar to me from reading period literature (Godey's, Sartain's) while others are still around (Harper's, The Atlantic). Most reviewers were anonymous, but Baym occasionally names reviewers, such as Edgar Allan Poe of Graham's. Baym has a particular interest in refuting the prevailing (in the 1980s) academic claim that antebellum America frowned upon fiction. Highly amusing for me, she probes and dissects views on US fiction that Nathaniel Hawthorne made, which are easily disproved by his own day, but were accepted by later critics. Honestly, the Hawthorne discourse is worth the read alone!
Nearly forty years after its publication, this book is in some places a period piece, but always a delightful one, and timelessly worthy of Baym's incredible study. She must have read every book review in every periodical (she focuses on twenty-one periodicals!) from that era that she could find, in the days of the microfiche and physical copies with their tiny, faded newsprint. What a scholar! Periodicals are so underrated in American scholarship and having a book focusing on them entirely is a real treat. I didn't know if this study could live up to Woman's Fiction, but it did! And now I want to read that one again...
September 12, 2024
As someone who doesn't have a lot of time for modern-day "elite" fiction (as Baym characterizes it) or those who wax enthusiastic over it, I was surprised to discover that there is a tradition that Antebellum Americans were not fans of the novel. For crying out loud, Dickens was so popular then that there were near riots when installments of The Old Curiosity Shop were shipped over, and publishers made boatloads of cash publishing his works outside of copyright. Lincoln telling Harriet Beecher Stowe she was responsible for the Civil War may be a myth, but her novel was a big enough deal they met, and it wouldn't have been banned in so many Southern states if it wasn't viewed as dangerously persuasive. Plus there wouldn't have been so many, many southern novels responding to it and attempting to debunk it if people weren't reading novels!
Certainly people read more poetry back then than we do today, but that doesn't mean they weren't reading novels. Sir Walter Scott was one of the most popular poets of the day -- but some of his novels sold more copies than his poetry. So I was on Baym's side from the beginning on this debate I didn't even know was happening, and wasn't entirely aware of through much of the book.
What intrigued me initially were Baym's points about how novels ended upending many of the assumptions of the intelligentsia and threatened their power. "The novel phenomenon caught reviewers by surprise. Not only was it a new form, it was a popular one; and it was an unprecedented cultural event for the masses to be determining the shape of culture. To follow the public instead of leading, to surrender critical judgment to the extent of permitting a low literary mode to assume cultural significance, involved critics in new and difficult professional decisions." "If an educated elite was to reassert its role as arbiter of taste, then it had to establish some control over novels, and this effort was described as an attempt to raise their quality."
Then I found myself absolutely fascinated by the differences between the media of the time and the media today, particularly when it comes to popular novels. "Reviewers of the time assumed that without the seal of popular approval a novel could not be put forward as a great work of art. And they also held that, though popularity was by no means in itself the test of artistic merit, one could never assume the opposite: that popularity implied poor art. The automatic correlation, in our own times, of popularity with inferiority involves a cynicism with respect to the popular mind that was not to be found among American reviewers during the 1840s and 1850s."
I have enjoyed nineteenth century literature since I was quite young, and the last few years I have been digging up reviews for these works from the nineteenth century, because I find reviews from then far more useful than much commentary from the present, and perhaps this is why. Not everything popular from back then has survived, but much of what has is now treated as if it's written in some curious code, to the point where I sometimes begin to wonder if the reviewer and I read the same book. Or where I just flat think the reviewer missed the point entirely.
For one thing, a lot of literature of the time, from novels to newspaper articles, rely heavily on Biblical passages and imagery, which modern readers and reviewers tend to miss, so I -- and nineteenth century readers -- will recognize that a passage springs from a Biblical tale and is making use of the related symbolism when the modern critic may miss that entirely. Not knowing what the author is playing with can result in some... interesting interpretations.
Not that nineteenth century reviewers didn't have their blind spots. I particularly enjoyed Baym's discussion of the reviewer's struggles to define "male" and "female" writing, mostly as applied to George Sand, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charlotte Bronte (although some of Emily Bronte's works sneak in). Some of the funniest passages in the book are contrasting quotes from reviewers of the time initially grappling with the works of "Currer Bell" when they first appeared, then what they had to say as the rumor spread that "Currer Bell" might be a woman, and finally all the backtracking after it was revealed that "Currer Bell" was actually Charlotte Bronte.
As Baym summarizes, "the character of Rochester was taken as brutal but true when the author was thought to be a man, as silly and soft when the author was thought to be a woman." And, once the author was definitively revealed to be Charlotte, "The coarseness and brutality of the characters no longer rose either from a crude male imagination or from female inexperience, but sprang from the horrible actualities of life in the English moor country as perceived by a deeply sensitive woman." Perhaps the funniest, and at the same time saddest, quote from this section -- and probably the best known from the time -- is when a Sartain's reviewer confidently asserts, "No woman could write Wuthering Heights."
One thing I appreciate about Baym is when she says, "nor do [antebellum] reviewers consider the possibility that [Rochester] was not supposed to be real but was meant for the sort of romantic daydream figure that many women enjoy so much (to judge by the popularity of the “gothic romances” of today, works whose heroes women never mistake for real men)." I think she exaggerates with her emphasis of "never" there, because I've known some younger romance fans who went through a period of at least wishing guys were like that, but I expect she's correct about romance fans in their twenties on up, and that's something a lot of critics of the genre don't seem to get.
All in all, a very fair-minded and interesting book. I found her multiple examples of this or that repetitious now or then, but that is because she is being thorough in supporting her argument. Brief passages, those, easily skipped and a very minor issue in a generally entertaining text.
Certainly people read more poetry back then than we do today, but that doesn't mean they weren't reading novels. Sir Walter Scott was one of the most popular poets of the day -- but some of his novels sold more copies than his poetry. So I was on Baym's side from the beginning on this debate I didn't even know was happening, and wasn't entirely aware of through much of the book.
What intrigued me initially were Baym's points about how novels ended upending many of the assumptions of the intelligentsia and threatened their power. "The novel phenomenon caught reviewers by surprise. Not only was it a new form, it was a popular one; and it was an unprecedented cultural event for the masses to be determining the shape of culture. To follow the public instead of leading, to surrender critical judgment to the extent of permitting a low literary mode to assume cultural significance, involved critics in new and difficult professional decisions." "If an educated elite was to reassert its role as arbiter of taste, then it had to establish some control over novels, and this effort was described as an attempt to raise their quality."
Then I found myself absolutely fascinated by the differences between the media of the time and the media today, particularly when it comes to popular novels. "Reviewers of the time assumed that without the seal of popular approval a novel could not be put forward as a great work of art. And they also held that, though popularity was by no means in itself the test of artistic merit, one could never assume the opposite: that popularity implied poor art. The automatic correlation, in our own times, of popularity with inferiority involves a cynicism with respect to the popular mind that was not to be found among American reviewers during the 1840s and 1850s."
I have enjoyed nineteenth century literature since I was quite young, and the last few years I have been digging up reviews for these works from the nineteenth century, because I find reviews from then far more useful than much commentary from the present, and perhaps this is why. Not everything popular from back then has survived, but much of what has is now treated as if it's written in some curious code, to the point where I sometimes begin to wonder if the reviewer and I read the same book. Or where I just flat think the reviewer missed the point entirely.
For one thing, a lot of literature of the time, from novels to newspaper articles, rely heavily on Biblical passages and imagery, which modern readers and reviewers tend to miss, so I -- and nineteenth century readers -- will recognize that a passage springs from a Biblical tale and is making use of the related symbolism when the modern critic may miss that entirely. Not knowing what the author is playing with can result in some... interesting interpretations.
Not that nineteenth century reviewers didn't have their blind spots. I particularly enjoyed Baym's discussion of the reviewer's struggles to define "male" and "female" writing, mostly as applied to George Sand, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charlotte Bronte (although some of Emily Bronte's works sneak in). Some of the funniest passages in the book are contrasting quotes from reviewers of the time initially grappling with the works of "Currer Bell" when they first appeared, then what they had to say as the rumor spread that "Currer Bell" might be a woman, and finally all the backtracking after it was revealed that "Currer Bell" was actually Charlotte Bronte.
As Baym summarizes, "the character of Rochester was taken as brutal but true when the author was thought to be a man, as silly and soft when the author was thought to be a woman." And, once the author was definitively revealed to be Charlotte, "The coarseness and brutality of the characters no longer rose either from a crude male imagination or from female inexperience, but sprang from the horrible actualities of life in the English moor country as perceived by a deeply sensitive woman." Perhaps the funniest, and at the same time saddest, quote from this section -- and probably the best known from the time -- is when a Sartain's reviewer confidently asserts, "No woman could write Wuthering Heights."
One thing I appreciate about Baym is when she says, "nor do [antebellum] reviewers consider the possibility that [Rochester] was not supposed to be real but was meant for the sort of romantic daydream figure that many women enjoy so much (to judge by the popularity of the “gothic romances” of today, works whose heroes women never mistake for real men)." I think she exaggerates with her emphasis of "never" there, because I've known some younger romance fans who went through a period of at least wishing guys were like that, but I expect she's correct about romance fans in their twenties on up, and that's something a lot of critics of the genre don't seem to get.
All in all, a very fair-minded and interesting book. I found her multiple examples of this or that repetitious now or then, but that is because she is being thorough in supporting her argument. Brief passages, those, easily skipped and a very minor issue in a generally entertaining text.
November 29, 2012
for research
May 22, 2014
Read for research for 19th Century American Novel paper.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews