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The Bridges of Madison County and Iowa: Production, Reception, and Place
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It is the "heartland," the home of the average middle American. Yet the definition of the Middle West, that most amorphous of regions, is elusive and changing. In historical, cultural, political, literary, and artistic terms the region is variously drawn. It is alternately praised as a pastoral oasis and damned as a cultural backwater, fostering wholesome pragmatism and crass materialism, home to people at once resilient and embittered, hardworking and complacent. From Willa Cather to Sherwood Anderson, from "The Wizard of Oz" to "The Music Man," images of the Middle West are powerful and contradictory. In this thoughtful book, cultural geographer James R. Shortridge offers a historical probe into the "idea" of the Middle West. By exploring what this term originally meant and how it has changed over the past 150 years, he presents a fascinating look at the question of regional identity and its place in the collective consciousness. A work of unconventional geography based on extensive research in popular literature, this volume examines meaning, essence, character the important intangibles of place not captured by statistical studies and explores the intimate connections between the notion of pastoralism and the definition of the Middle West."
Deftly melding ethnography, cultural history, literary criticism, and autobiographical reflection, A Feeling for Books is at once an engaging study of the Book-of-the-Month Club's influential role as a cultural institution and a profoundly personal meditation about the experience of reading. Janice Radway traces the history of the famous mail-order book club from its controversial founding in 1926 through its evolution into an enterprise uniquely successful in blending commerce and culture. Framing her historical narrative with writing of a more personal sort, Radway reflects on the contemporary role of the Book-of-the-Month Club in American cultural history and in her own life. Her detailed account of the standards and practices employed by the club's in-house editors is also an absorbing story of her interactions with those editors. Examining her experiences as a fourteen-year-old reader of the club's selections and, later, as a professor of literature, she offers a series of rigorously analytical yet deeply personal readings of such beloved novels as Marjorie Morningstar and To Kill a Mockingbird . Rich and rewarding, this book will captivate and delight anyone who is interested in the history of books and in the personal and transformative experience of reading. |For anyone who is interested in the history of books and in the personal and transformative experience of reading. Radway offers both an engaging look at the Book-of the-Month Club's role as a cultural institution and a profound meditation on the love of books.
By placing "Unforgiven" in the context of the western genre and Clint Eastwood's prior films and by using a broadly cognitive approach, this essay shows how the film elicits conflicted emotional responses to the violence it depicts.
In recent years the study of popular culture has gained legitimacy in American universities. Several intellectual developments have stimulated this: a sociological perspective on the “production of culture” that tends to minimize the differences between high and popular culture; work in anthropology and other fields that has broadened the concept of what can be studied as a “text” and increasing attention in several disciplines to the role of audiences in constructing the works of art they read or interpret. This essay critically reviews these developments and discusses their implications for the university.
This paper uses detailed weekly data on sales of hardcover fiction books to evaluate the impact of New York Times book reviews on sales. In order to weigh the relative propensity of reviews to inform and to persuade, the analysis utilizes a measure of review opinion obtained through a systematic reading of each review. The estimates indicate that in the case of book reviews, any publicity is good publicity: even negative reviews lead to increases in sales. We interpret this finding as evidence that book reviews serve largely to inform consumers about books' content and characteristics (including the books' existence). However, positive reviews have a larger impact on sales than negative reviews, suggesting that reviews also have a persuasive effect.
Building on earlier work in the production of culture, reception aesthetics, and cultural capital, sociology of literature research during the past few years has concentrated on readers' construction of meaning and on networks within literary systems. New directions include studying the relationship between literature and group identities; connecting institutional and reader-response analyses; reintroducing the role of authorial intentionality; and developing a clearer understanding of how literature is and is not like other media.
Movies provide the objects and subjects for the gaze of many people, and for some people, movies induce them to travel to the locations where they were filmed. The data gathered at 12 US locations supports earlier anecdotal accounts of movie-induced tourism. This paper extends from earlier studies by suggesting a variety of reasons for this type of gaze and documents some of the impacts on movie-induced tourism locations. Visitation data were gathered from a variety of settings and were aggregated to show the power of movies when inducing people to locations. Data analysis showed at least four years of visitation increases after movies were released.
Simultaneously celebrated and denigrated, celebrities represent not only the embodiment of success, but also the ultimate construction of false value. Celebrity and Power questions the impulse to become embroiled with the construction and collapse of the famous, exploring the concept of the new public intimacy: A product of social media in which celebrities from Lady Gaga to Barack Obama are expected to continuously campaign for audiences in new ways. In a new Introduction for this edition, P. David Marshall investigates the viewing public’s desire to associate with celebrity and addresses the explosion of instant access to celebrity culture, bringing famous people and their admirers closer than ever before. © 2014 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved.
"James Hearst wrote eloquently of the land, its pleasures and sorrows, carefully turning the language as one of his farmer heroes turns the soil. Scott Cawelti and his colleagues have done us all a favor by assembling this fine collection, ensuring the onward resonance of Hearst's words and sensibilities."--Robert James Waller " 'Write about what you know!' was the only advice given by the shy published poet to the shy girl who walked from her college to his farm, having begun to discover what she knew by crafting poems. Surely James Hearst knew pain and loss in plenty, but once he had sworn never again to 'uncover [his] door' to this kind of 'rain,' the world pitchforked its bounties to him through every window available to a poet. The results run from the perfect early nature lyric, 'Blue Again,' to the moving and rich domestic wisdom of 'Close Call.' This book is a late, uneven harvest, but a fine one."--Mona Van Duyn, U.S. Poet Laureate, 1992-1993 Part of the regionalist movement that included Grant Wood, SCOTT CAWELTI is professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa. He is the author of The Inventive Writer and Introduction to College Writing. He also writes a weekly column for the Waterloo Courier and has been a commentator for National Public Radio. In keeping with the tradition of small regional presses and fine printers-especially Prairie Press, which published Hearst's poetry throughout his lifetime-this edition was designed in collaboration with the University of Iowa Center for the Book.
This paper uses detailed weekly data on sales of hardcover fiction books to evaluate the impact of the New York Times bestseller list on sales and product variety. In order to circumvent the obvious problem of simultaneity of sales and bestseller status, the analysis exploits time lags and accidental omissions in the construction of the list. The empirical results indicate that appearing on the list leads to a modest increase in sales for the average book, and that the effect is more dramatic for bestsellers by debut authors. The paper discusses how the additional concentration of demand on top-selling books could lead to a reduction in the privately optimal number of books to publish. However, the data suggest the opposite is true: the market expansion effect of bestseller lists appears to dominate any business stealing from non-bestselling titles.
Daily quotes Winterset civic and business leader John Reed, president of a local building supply company, as saying that renewed efforts to attract productions began as early as 1985
- Fictional Eagle Rock
fictional Eagle Rock, Iowa (which is also the name of a real Iowa town)-quitting
smoking at once, had been filmed in Winterset. Daily reported that "Winterset [had] been
courting Hollywood for years, with a savvy eye on the town's bottom line." Daily quotes
Winterset civic and business leader John Reed, president of a local building supply
company, as saying that renewed efforts to attract productions began as early as 1985:
"The eighties were hard on Iowa rural communities" Reed told Daily. "In the course of
pursuing economic development... it became apparent that [Winterset] should be
including movies in that same pursuit." Because of what Daily calls the town's
"Victorian houses and frozen-in-time courthouse square," the town managed to lure eight
or ten producers to scout the location, and almost landed a made-for-TV movie that
ended up being filmed in Nebraska (Daily 116-117).
This perception is evident even in Metz's appraisal of the Bridges movie adaptation as ideologically forward-thinking. For example, Metz uses a Freudian interpretation of joking to show how the movie more fully develops Francesca's character against the
- However
However, in securing that gain it traded upon its portrayal as "simple," a quality
that at times equates small-town Iowa culture with cultural and ideological backwardness.
This perception is evident even in Metz's appraisal of the Bridges movie adaptation as
ideologically forward-thinking. For example, Metz uses a Freudian interpretation of
joking to show how the movie more fully develops Francesca's character against the
"bourgeois patriarchy" of her surroundings, with its "suppressions and repressions" of
Then you're not that lost," she tells him playfully. For Metz, this joke "in effect tells Robert that to her, one place in Iowa is pretty much the same as the next," expressing "her discontent with her situation" (Metz 78)
- Francesca
Francesca's "social position" as a farm wife (78). Metz recounts the scene from the
movie in which Robert, just having arrived in Iowa, meets Francesca for the first time on
the porch of her farmhouse. Robert tells her he is lost, she asks him whether he's
supposed to be in Iowa, and he replies in the affirmative. "Then you're not that lost," she
tells him playfully. For Metz, this joke "in effect tells Robert that to her, one place in
Iowa is pretty much the same as the next," expressing "her discontent with her situation"
(Metz 78). In the same exchange, Robert asks if she would like to accompany him on his
photo shoot to Roseman Bridge, unless she has "other work to do." She replies, "I was
going to split the atom, but that can wait," which for Metz suggests that "... as a farmer
in Iowa, what work of importance could there be to do that could not be done the next
day?" (78). This assumption may have been reinforced by the entire set of phenomena
surrounding Bridges. Because Francesca is a farm wife, she must be a "poor wretch," as
Bonnie Brennen put it (70).
House is a tourist attraction . . . that's famous for being famous
- Francesca
Francesca's House is a tourist attraction... that's famous for being famous."
In October 2003, Madison County supervisors awarded a $576,406 contract to
Eastwood directed an adaptation of John Berendt's 1994 novel Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil in Savannah, Georgia. Berendt's novel had broken Bridges' record of 162 consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestsell ers list, staying on the list for 216 weeks total (C. Weeks)
- Clint Eastwood
- Oprah Winfrey
Clint Eastwood, Oprah Winfrey, and popular literature after Bridges
As a director, Eastwood repeated the Bridges pattern of turning a place-based
bestseller into a movie with a ready-made audience and location. In 1997, Eastwood
directed an adaptation of John Berendt's 1994 novel Midnight in the Garden of Good and
Evil in Savannah, Georgia. Berendt's novel had broken Bridges' record of 162
consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestsell ers list, staying on the list for 216
weeks total (C. Weeks). As Bridges had in Madison County, Midnight in the Garden of
Good and Evil spawned a significant tourism industry in Savannah. According to Carl
Solana Weeks in the New Georgia Encyclopedia, the book brought "hundreds of
thousands of tourists.... Hotel-motel tax revenues rose about twenty-five percent in the
two years following publication of the book, and cottage industries... sprang up like
morning glories." The Savannah Economic Development Authority and mayor Floyd
Adams even declared April 26, 1996 "John Berendt Day." (C. Weeks). In 2003,
Eastwood also directed a version of Dennis Lahane's 2001 bestseller Mystic River, set in
Boston, that was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture. Both Eastwood
adaptations were Malpaso/Warner Brothers productions.
The Revenue Streams that Flow From The Bridges of Madison County
- Ty Ahmad-Taylor
Ahmad-Taylor, Ty. "The Revenue Streams that Flow From The Bridges of Madison
County." New York Times 19 June 1995: D7.
Building Bridges: Will the Film Boost Sales of Waller's First Novel?
- Karen Angel
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Publishers Weekly 5 June 1995: 19-21.
Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth. Series in Contemporary Ethnography
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Playing for High Stakes
- John Baker
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National Book Awards. National Book Foundation. Marriott Marquis Hotel
- Neil Baldwin
Baldwin, Neil. "Introduction of Oprah Winfrey, 50
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Tuning in to Twentysomething
- Jonathan Bing
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The Booksellers' Art of Persausion
- Robert Bly
- John
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Bridging the Backlash: A Cultural Materialist Reading of The Bridges of Madison County
- Bonnie Brennan
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of Madison County." Studies in Popular Culture 19.1 (1996): 59-77.
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Bridges of Madison County Filming Brings in Tourists
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Latest Bridge Fire Sparks Worry for Other Sites
- Jenna Buzzaco
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Yes, Clint and Meryl Bathed There, But It Was Only a Movie
- John Carlson
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For Bookseller and Publisher, Rules to Live by in 1998
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- Maureen Egan
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Literary Economics and Literary History
- William Charvat
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Rev. of A Hole in the Earth by Robert Bausch
- Robert Clark
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- Dennis Clayson
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Iowa Town Reaps Gold From Novel
- Francis X Clines
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Author Waller Leaves Large Estate Gift to Alma Mater
- Barbara Coffman
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A Place of Sense: Essays in Search of the Midwest
- Gary Comstock
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The Cover that Never Was
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The Stars of Madison County
- Bob Daily
- Patricia A Denato
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98-120.