Contents -- Introduction: Reception Study: Achievements and New Directions -- I. (Re)Theorizing Reception Study -- Understanding an Other: Reading as a Receptive Form of Communicative Action -- Judging and Hoping: Rhetorical Effects of Reading about Reading -- Activating the Multitude: Audience Powers and Cultural Studies -- Habitus Clivé: Aesthetics and Politics in the Work of Pierre Bourdieu -- II. Texts, Authors, and the Receptions of Literature -- The American Reception of Melville's Short Fiction in the 1850s -- Placing Readers at the Forefront of Nowhere: Reception Studies and Utopian Literature -- Richard Wright's Native Son: From Naturalist Protest to Modernist Liberation and Beyond -- Main Street Reading Main Street -- Learning from Philistines: Suspicion, Refusing to Read, and the Rise of Dubious Modernism -- Reception and Authenticity: Danny Santiago's Famous All over Town -- Discourses in Dialogue: The Reception of Alix Kates Shulman's Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen -- III. Books, Print Culture, and Historical Sites of Reception -- The Power of Recirculation: Scrapbooks and the Reception of the Nineteenth-Century Press -- Accuracy or Fair Play? Complaining about the Newspaper in Early Twentieth-Century New York -- Sentiment without Tears: Uncle Tom's Cabin as History in the 1890s -- IV. Audiences, Fans, and Viewers in Media and Cultural Studies -- Kiss Me Deadly: Cold War Threats from Spillane to Aldrich, New York to Los Angeles, and the Mafia to the H-Bomb -- Textual Poaching or Gamekeeping? A Comparative Study of Two Six Feet Under Internet Fan Forums -- Political Talk and the Flow of Ambient Television: Women Watching Oprah in an African American Hair Salon -- V. Retrospective Prospects -- What's the Matter with Reception Study? Some Thoughts on the Disciplinary Origins, Conceptual Constraints, and Persistent Viability of a Paradigm.

The Reception Deception -- Notes on Contributors -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- W.