Tag: reception

Howell, Thomas. Soldiers of the Pen: The Writers’ War Board in World War II.

Posted on by Anna Muenchrath

Thomas Howell’s study of the Writers’ War Board (WWB) joins the likes of Janice Radway’s A Feeling for Books on the Book-of-The-Month Club (1997) and the more recent work of Eric Bennett on American writing workshops (2015) and Sarah Brouillette in UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary (2019) in presenting the reader with a sustained study of an institution and its history, ideology, and material effects. Howell makes use of archival materials from the Library of Congress, Boston College, and elsewhere to recreate this history…

Robert Mayer. Walter Scott and Fame. Authors and Readers in the Romantic Age

Posted on by Ileana Baird

Professor Mayer’s book is an insightful, eye-opening exploration of the emergence of a new type of literary celebrity at the beginning of the nineteenth century based on close readings of Walter Scott’s correspondence. Considered by Byron himself as “the first man of his time,” Scott is an ideal case study due to the immense popularity he enjoyed during his lifetime as a result of his poetic and novelistic output, especially the Waverley cycle. Beautifully contextualized through comparisons with predecessors such as Pope and Johnson, contemporaries such as Wordsworth, Southey, and Byron, and successors such as Dickens, Hardy, and Hemingway, this study sheds considerable light on the evolution of literary celebrity in general and on the brand of celebrity that Walter Scott embodied in the public consciousness of his time in particular.