Professor Annika Bautz

This chapter establishes the novel's early popularity in the context of the transatlantic reprint trade. It discusses illustrations to editions of the Last Days from around the Atlantic, focusing primarily on the late nineteenth century, to determine some of the reasons for the novel's lasting appeal. Illustrations in editions across Europe and North America show Romans as decadent, vain, lazy and busy attending orgies and baths. Illustrations to the novel in European and North American editions thus show Christianity to be one of the main reasons for the novel's appeal throughout the nineteenth century. Illustrations also modify the text's Christianity to make it broader and blander: while the text's ideal Christianity is a moderate, nineteenth-century Anglican one, the illustrations give readers a more basic binary opposition of Christian morality and Roman depravity.

This chapter discusses the transatlantic publishing industry in the nineteenth century. Its focus is on the publication of British-authored texts in the United States, from Independence in 1776 to the passing of the first bilateral copyright act, the Chace Act, in 1891. The lack of an international copyright agreement was the single most important determinant of the transatlantic trade in texts. In the US it meant that British authors were not protected by copyright and consequently did not need to be paid, unlike their American counterparts. The reprint trade of British texts in America was therefore a very important component of the American market; however, the nineteenth century also saw the development of an increasingly independent American publishing industry that brought out a growing proportion of American authors. Investigating the various ways in which British texts were made available in the United States emphasises the importance of the transatlantic dimension of literary culture in the nineteenth century.

This volume concerns judges, judgment and judgmentalism. It studies the Victorians as judges across a range of important fields, including the legal and aesthetic spheres, and within literature. It examines how various specialist forms of judgment were conceived and operated, and how the propensity to be judgmental was viewed.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

This Guide discusses the range of critical reactions to three of Jane Austen's most widely-studied and popular novels. Annika Bautz takes the reader chronologically through the profusion of criticism by selecting key approaches from the immense variety of responses these three Austen novels have provoked over the last two centuries.

This text makes an important contribution to transatlantic literary studies and an emerging body of work on identity formation and print culture in the Atlantic world. The collection identifies the ways in which historically-situated but malleable subjectivities engage with popular and pressing debates about class, slavery, natural knowledge, democracy, and religion. In addition, the book also considers the ways in which material texts and genres, including, for example, the essay, the guidebook, the travel narrative, the periodical, the novel, and the poem, can be scrutinized in relation to historically-situated transatlantic transitions, transformations, and border crossings.

Studies of the reception of a literary work have traditionally relied mainly on the evidence of printed reviews. However, reviewing is a public activity, and does not represent readers' private opinions, especially in the case of novels because of their low status. Also, reviewing was a male-dominated field, so that it does not give conclusions to women's reactions to Austen's novels. This survey of informal comments made by early nineteenth-century male and female readers in diaries and letters reveals ways in which readers responded to Austen's texts. Among the social classes that could comment in writing, the remarks are by those readers who were driven to record their thoughts. Whether a passing observation, sincere criticism, a recommendation to get hold of and read a novel, a request to a publisher to send another Austen novel as soon as possible or instructions as to where to send it to, these comments show the active nature of private readers' physical and textual engagement with Austen's novels.

Of all the great novelists of the Romantic period, only two, Jane Austen and Walter Scott, have been continuously reprinted, admired, argued about, and read, from the moment their works first appeared until the present day. In a pioneering study, Annika Bautz traces how Scott’s nineteenth-century success among all classes of readers made him the most admired and most widely read novelist in history, only for his readership to plummet sharply downwards in the twentieth century. Austen’s popularity, by contrast, has risen inexorably, overtaking Scott’s, and bringing about a reversal in reputation that would have been unthinkable in the authors’ own time. To assess the reactions of readers belonging to diverse interpretative communities, Bautz draws on a wide range of indicators, including editions, publisher’s relaunches, sales, reviews, library catalogues and lending figures, private comments in diaries and letters, popularisations. She maps out the long-run changes in the reception of each author over two centuries, explaining literary tastes and their determinants, and illuminating the broader culture of the successive reading audiences who gave both authors their uninterrupted loyalty. The first ever comparative longitudinal study, firmly based on empirical and archival evidence, this book will be of interest to scholars in Romanticism, Victorianism, book history, reading and reception studies, and cultural history.

“An engaging collection of voices commemorate the first two centuries of Austen’s reception in this volume. These essays share a commitment to level academic and public discourse on Austen and to embrace Austen’s multimedia legacy.” – Inger S. B. Brody, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA Austen After 200 explores our contemporary relationship with Jane Austen in the wake of the bicentenaries of her death and the first publication of her novels. The volume begins by looking at Austen’s popular appeal and at how she is consumed today in diverse cultural venues such the digisphere, blogosphere, festivals and book clubs. It then offers new approaches to the novels within various critical contexts, including adaptation studies, fan fiction, intertextuality, and more. Collecting these new essays in one volume enables a unique view of the crossovers and divergences in engagements with Austen in different settings, and will help a comparative approach between the popular and the academic to emerge more fully in Austen studies. The book gathers insights from a range of contributors invested in new reading spaces in order to show the creative ways in which we are all adapting as we continue to read Austen’s works. Kerry Sinanan is Assistant Professor of Transatlantic Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio, USA. She has published on Jane Austen and Barbara Pym, and many articles on Black Atlantic texts, including The Woman of Colour (1808). Annika Bautz is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Plymouth, UK. Her publications include books and essays on Jane Austen, Walter Scott and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and on the history of the book in the Romantic and Victorian periods. Daniel Cook is Reader in English at the University of Dundee, UK. He is the author of Thomas Chatterton and Neglected Genius, 1760-1830 (2013), Reading Swift's Poetry (2020), and Walter Scott and Short Fiction (2021).

This essay focuses on introductions to editions of Austen's texts published in the 1890s. By the late nineteenth century, Austen's popularity and status as an author of canonical texts was beyond doubt. While illustrations to the various competing editions have received critical attention in recent decades, the other main paratext, introductions, have largely gone unacknowledged, yet deserve attention both because of their cultural significance and in their own right as critical engagements with the novels. The introduction writers were men of some standing whose contributions added weight to Austen's texts. Their emphases on realism and humour in particular, as well as the predominant view of the author as a female genius whose art - especially her satire - had a masculine quality, but without ever seeing her as overstepping female boundaries, would have influenced many thousands of readers' engagement with Austen's texts.