In a recent post about Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus's article "Surface Reading," I suggested that the history of a text's reception could constitute a surface-reading practice. Here, I want to take up my promise to discuss the affinities between reception history and one of the modes of reading that Best and Marcus do include: genre criticism.

In Best and Marcus's special issue of Representations, this practice is advocated by Margaret Cohen, whose article "Narratology in the Archive of Literature" makes a strong case for the "excavation of forgotten literary forms" (51). She argues that we need to recover forgotten genres—genres that have lost canonical status, or never possessed it in the first place—in order to discern "poetic practices" that "may have been intuitively recognizable to contemporaries at the time they were produced" (59).

For Cohen, the purpose of reconstructing a text's forgotten generic horizons is to make possible a discussion of "literature's aesthetic excellence" (51). In my view, there are other and more interesting things to do with the reading practice that she sets out; my purpose here is to sketch one of these possibilities.

Initially, it looks like the responses of past readers will be integral to Cohen's project; she criticizes the tendency of modern scholars to cherry-pick responses that coincide with their own predilections (53) and characterizes "the critical appreciation of contemporaries" as a tool for uncovering "the coherence of forgotten aesthetics" (60). But the case study that Cohen presents—an account of sea adventure fiction that focuses on Robinson Crusoe and Lord Jim—does relatively little with reception: though Cohen discusses Crusoe as Defore's fictional reworking of a popular nonfictional genre, she says relatively little about the readership of sea adventure fiction after the eighteenth century. This neglect is, to my mind, something of a missed opportunity. What now forgotten novels would have constructed a "horizon of possibilities" (60) recognizable to Conrad's readers? Did such readers register the way that, according to Cohen, "Conrad transfers the work of navigation to narration," (71) part of his process of "invent[ing] modernism from sea adventure fiction" (69)?

I ask those questions in part because I have very recently been thinking about the forgotten generic horizon of another text claimed as an early work of modernism: The Story of an African Farm (1883), by Olive Schreiner. At the start of his article "The Colonial Bildungsroman: 'The Story of an African Farm' and the Ghost of Goethe", Jed Esty describes Schreiner's novel as a kind of monstrous hybrid, incorporating such genres as New Woman fiction, Victorian melodrama, and allegory, to which Esty adds the bildungsroman (407).

But for at least some of Schreiner's nineteenth-century readers, the generic horizons of The Story of an African Farm were those of the theological novel. In fact, I wouldn't even be discussing Schreiner's book were it not for a cluster of Victorian articles that refer to it alongside two theological novels that I've been researching: Mrs. Humphry Ward's Robert Elsmere (1888) and Margaret Deland's John Ward, Preacher (1888). (So far, most of these references have appeared in American newspapers, which may be significant, or maybe I just haven't looked hard enough at British sources.)

An article published in The New-York Tribune on December 9, 1888 and titled "Three Great Religious Novels" is fairly typical in aligning the three books as "The Gospel of the Modern Doubter." But my favorite instance of such alignment is an advertisment (which I've seen in The New York Times, The New-York Tribune, and The Chicago Tribune) in which Roberts Brothers of Boston quotes an editorial from The Boston Saturday Evening Gazette on "The Heretical Literary Tradition" as constituted by these three novels, which the Gazette praises for presenting "the problems of our age," declaring that "the thanks of all men who are studying and working with these problems in mind are due to these three women, who have given them light, even though they have not given all that is needed.” Various next steps and further questions immediately present themselves. African Farm was published in 1883. How did the association of the novel with the popular Robert Elsmere and John Ward alter public perceptions of it? I haven't yet done the research to fully answer that question (or even to know whether other scholars have touched on related issues), but the preliminary results are suggestive. Schreiner's publisher, Chapman and Hall, brought out a new edition in 1887, one that was more heavily advertised than the first, and that attracted more attention from reviewers. What is the relationship between this surge of interest in African Farm and the publication of these other theological novels? Did books like Robert Elsmere and John Ward effectively create a generic horizon that enabled readers to make sense of and find interest in Schreiner's book? What I'm hypothesizing—very tentatively!—is that the "horizon of possibilities" changed in the late 1880s, giving contemporary readers a context that made African Farm more interesting and more legible. It seems to me that the most obvious methodology offered by Cohen's article is as follows: 1. pick a canonical work 2. discover a forgotten genre that was popular before the canonical work was published 3. show how the now-canonical author transformed a forgotten genre into a canonical text. But whatever I figure out about the intersection between the theological romance and The Story of an African Farm, it won't take this form, because Schreiner's novel is not drawing on an established genre, but rather anticipates that genre.^[1] One could, I suppose, try to make the argument that Schreiner's novel influenced the later texts, or that all of these books pick up on ideas about religion that were "in the air." What I want to argue is that a more productive line of inquiry—one that will, I hope, remain firmly grounded in historical evidence—entails looking at the experiences of the contemporary readers who grouped these texts, whether they saw them as "Great Religious Novels" or a "Heretical Literary Tradition."

[1]One of the novels that I'm including in this new project was published in 1881—J. H. Shorthouse's John Inglesant. The others are all from 1888 or later; if there are other texts that precede African Farm, I have yet to discover them.