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

Abstract

With the great traditions from Austen through Dickens and Eliot to Hardy read here 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 a priori reader function toward this reader figure, this volume 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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