Communities of Cultural Value: Reception Study, Political Differences, and Literary History

Reception Study is a discipline that assumes that the reader’s interpretive practices explain a text’s import. In this work, Communities of Cultural Value , Philip Goldstein delves into the realm of literary criticism, painting an absorbing picture of the changing nature of a growing, more diversified readership and its challenge to professional literary study. Goldstein’s Post-Marxist approach investigates the interpretive communities or reading formations governing the reader’s practices through a series of lucid case studies analyzing the reception of a number of exemplary texts and authors, from Jane Austen to John Le Carre. Communities of Cultural Values is an important addition to the continuing debate over art’s aesthetic autonomy and the role of literary criticism in the 1990s and should be valuable to readers seeking to chart the changing socio-historical condition of literary study.