With the 2020 volume year, Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History celebrates a dozen years of publication. We believe this issue continues the journal's ongoing success in offering original, stimulating research and scholarship in audience and reception studies. That quality was recently affirmed by scholars and critics from another literary field when the Society for the Study of Midwest Literature named Mary Ungar's article in the 2019 issue of Reception, “The Book Circle: Black Women Readers and Middlebrow Taste in Chicago,” as the winner of the David D. Anderson Award for Outstanding Essay in Midwestern Literary Studies. We want to offer our congratulations to Professor Unger for her achievement and to express our gratification that Reception was the venue that brought her fine article before the scholarly community.
But to return to the 2020 issue of Reception, the four essays in this volume are evenly divided between discussions of...
