Abstract
In this chapter the discussion turns finally to the reception side of the interactive text event, with a discussion of ways in which The Great World has been grasped by readers, reviewers, book groups, and the media. This chapter also continues the focus of the previous chapter on promotion by looking at the ways in which various forms of reader response to the text have been (and are being) incorporated into the processes of marketing. These reader responses include, for example, the “blurbs” by professional reviewers and well-known authors that conventionally form an integral part of cover designs. Another genre of reader response in which the distinction between reception and promotion becomes blurred relates to the use of websites (such as TLC Book Tours) that host “virtual book tours,” posting a review of a text and encouraging comments from other readers. The complex networks of mutual obligation, entrepreneurship, and criticism that enable and are made visible by these reception/promotion activities provide the literary geographer with a valuable resource for the analysis of the mechanisms through which certain novels become widely read.
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Notes
Bill Morris, “To Blurb or Not to Blurb?,” February 15, 2011, accessed May 11, 2014, http://www.themillions.com/2011/02/to-blurb-or -not-to-blurb.html.
On geographies of reception, see, for example, Innes M. Keighren, “Bringing Geography to the Book: Charting the Reception of Influences of Geographic Environment,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31, no. 4 (2006): 525– 40;
David L. Livingstone, “Science, Text and Space: Thoughts on the Geography of Reading,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30, no. 4 (2005): 391– 401.
Yap, “Readers- in-Conversations.” In focusing on the politics of reading, Yap is here following Richard Phillips in his work on children’s stories; see, for example, his “Politics of Reading: Decolonizing Children’s Geographies,” Cultural Geographies 8, no. 2 (2001): 125– 50.
Carleigh Stiehm, “Let the Great World Spin Chosen as Duke’s Class of 2017 Summer Reading,” The Chronicle: The Independent Daily at Duke University, March 27, 2013, accessed May 10, 2014, www.dukechronicle.com/articles/2013/03/26/let-great -world-spin-chosen-dukes-class-2017-summer-reading.
Sasha Zients, “McCann Urges Students to Embrace Potential Failure,” The Duke University Chronicle August 31, 2013, accessed May 10, 2014, http://www.dukechronicle.com/articles/2013/08/31/mccann -urges-students-embrace-potential-failure.
Emma Baccellieri, “Colum McCann Talks 9/11, Literature,” The Duke University Chronicle, September 3, 2013, accessed May 10, 2014, http://www.dukechronicle.com/articles/2013/09/03/colum -mccann-talks-911-literature.
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© 2014 Sheila Hones
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Hones, S. (2014). Geographies of Reception. In: Literary Geographies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137413130_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137413130_10
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