Getting at the author

"Throughout the nineteenth century, American readers and reviewers assumed that a book revealed its author's individuality, that the experience of reading was a kind of conversation with the writer. Yet as Barbara Hochman shows in this illuminating study, the emergence of literary realism at the turn of the century called such assumptions into question. The realist aesthetic of narrative "objectivity" challenged the notion that a literary text reflects its author's personality.".

"In analyzing the battle over realism and the gradual shift in conventional reading practices, Hochman draws on a rich array of sources, including popular works, advertisements, letters, and reviews. She combines traditional modes of literary inquiry with methods adapted from the new historicism, cultural studies, and book history.

By elucidating the realists' ambivalence about their own aesthetic criteria, she shows how a late nineteenth-century conflict about reading practices reflected pressing tensions in American culture, and how that conflict shaped criteria of literary value for most of the twentieth century."--BOOK JACKET.