Dear reader : the conscripted audience in nineteenth-century British fiction

"Ready now, reader? Easy then. That should put you in the right historical frame of mind, put you in mind of the right historical frame. For it did seem easier then, certainly more relaxed. Like the addressed and otherwise rendered nineteenth-century reader who is my subject of study, you are invited to take it slow while we back our way into the last century. We do so by moving from an unexpected modernist send-up of Victorian direct address, an early twist of phrase in E. M. Forster's 1907 The Longest Journey, to the underlying aesthetic of classic realism on which even this one rhetorical irony is by no means intended to pull the plug. On the way back to the nineteenth century, certain realist assumptions help mark out our course."--from Dear Reader With the "great tradition" from Austen through Dickens and Eliot to Hardy read here for the first time alongside the non-canonical best-sellers of the period, we get a revised picture of an evolving readership narrated rather than merely implied, the mass audience conscripted, written with, figured in. Redirecting response aesthetics away from the a priori reader function toward this reader figure, Garrett Stewart's Dear Reader intercepts two tendencies in the recent criticism of fiction: the blanket audience determinations of ideological critique and the thinness of historicizing discourse analysis when divorced from literary history's own discursive field.

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Stewart presents the relationship between 19th-century British fiction and its audience as, in a sense, the symbiosis of the two. On the one hand, the reader created meaning from the text in the act of reading it. On the other hand, the text created the reader and "conscripted" that reader, dragged the reader into its "world." He focuses on the rhetorical strategies of direct address ("Dear reader") and indirect address ("The reader will remember ... "). Following three introductory chapters, the author traces this relationship through the century, from Jane Austen to Thomas Hardy, and with lengthy discussions of late-century writers who wrote as the convention was being abandoned in the move toward modernism. The book is thoroughly researched and quite provocative, although the author's style tends toward an obscurity that is annoying and that suggests he was more interested in style than in substance. Extensive endnotes. Upper-division undergraduate through faculty. J. L. Culross; Eastern Kentucky University

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