In the years since the publication of works like Janice Radway's Reading the Romance (1984) and Lawrence Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow (1990), historians have paid close attention to the importance of books and the social act of reading, especially in the rapid and disruptive making of a modern America in the two decades before and after 1900. The ways in which books shaped and reflected the era's social and cultural conflicts are now familiar markers in how twentieth-century industrial and corporate America is described. New production technologies, managerial techniques, and retail outlets inundated consumers with cheap, affordable, and expensive print materials. Networks of transportation and communication created national and transnational reading markets and communities. University faculties constructed fortified categories of “literature” as a sacred terrain accessible only to an educated elite even as philanthropic women led movements to democratize reading and readers through public libraries. High and low, highbrow and lowbrow, books and reading marked who Americans were and who they aspired or dared to become in the early twentieth century.

Two recent books, Barbara Hochman's Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Reading Revolution and Mark Storey's Rural Fictions and Urban Realities, demonstrate that, at this stage of scholarship, the history of books, literature, and reading between 1880 and 1920 is anything but a finished business. Hochman examines a single and singular work and incorporates a tightly woven examination of textual meaning, print culture, and the social act of reading across more than half a century; Storey restricts his inquiry to the textual matter between the covers of books and stories about rural life that were published in the 1880s and 1890s. Both share a historicist approach to their common focus on the relation of literature to modernity and in this respect warrant the close attention of historians of the period.

Hochman's work stretches the history of the nineteenth century's most famous book beyond the more familiar sociocultural, literary, and political terms in which scholars have measured its significance. Hochman does not neglect these subjects, but extending the novel's history to the 1890s allows her to illuminate in new and unconventional ways the importance of Uncle Tom's Cabin to the history of reading and books. Part of what makes Hochman's study so valuable, especially to historians, is her methodological decision to underscore the history of Uncle Tom's Cabin as both a story (literary text) and an object (book). Instead of emphasizing either the reader's autonomy in deciding textual meaning or the text's independent authority over its meaning, Hochman takes a less deterministic middle-ground position: “the theoretical and methodological intersection where literature meets history” (9). From this vantage point, she locates importance in individuals' experience of reading the story and in the social and cultural forces that constrain what a text can mean and do to its readers.

The first half of the book addresses the antebellum history of Uncle Tom's Cabin and explores the cultural and private experience of reading it. The first chapter provides an ingenious and welcome analysis of the physical setting of the novel's serialization, the National Era, and argues that Stowe defied the conventional depictions of slavery and the mortality of children. Additional chapters on reading, as a narrative trope and as a social act, are followed by an analysis of the children's adaptation, Pictures and Stories from Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853). These chapters argue for the formative influence of the novel and its message in condemning slavery in its own time and in permanently changing the reading habits of children and adults. Prior to Uncle Tom's Cabin, middle-class Americans had regarded the reading of fiction as dangerous and immoral. While the novel's critical episodes showing the enslaved reading the Bible conveyed the radical message that free and enslaved alike possessed a common subjectivity, Stowe's integration of evangelical piety into a narrative that enthralled readers opened the door to middle-class acceptance of the morality of fiction. Black people could be entrusted with the word and respectable white people with fiction.

The second half examines the “new cultural work” (147) that the novel performed in the postbellum period and the profound transformation in the story's meaning. By this time a northern white middle-class reading public embraced fiction but was increasingly indifferent to reform and sentiment in the literature it read. By the year of Stowe's death, 1896, the environment shaped by the ascendant preference for literary realism and the emerging Jim Crow order had transformed Uncle Tom's Cabin as a material object and as a story. The novel whose irresistible indictment of slavery had gripped antebellum readers became a museum piece of classic literature recommended for its historical (not literary) importance and in spite (not because) of its power to move hearts. Moreover, Hochman shows, by the 1890s the novel's text reinforced rather than indicted the racism of white readers, who encountered its message within a transformed paratextual packaging. New introductions, illustrations, and thoroughly reworked children's adaptations caricatured Stowe's prose and egalitarian claims as hopelessly sentimental. “Reworked and repackaged, Uncle Tom's Cabin turned into a virulently racist book” (20)—except along society's margins, where African Americans and recent immigrants continued to read it as a radical indictment of notions of racial and ethnic difference and hierarchy. In Hochman's hands, Uncle Tom's Cabin becomes a textbook-caliber object lesson in the dynamic history of reading and what we might call (after Martha Hodes, The Sea Captain's Wife, 2006) the mercurial nature of literary meaning as a story or book moves across space and time.

Hochman's contention about the modernization of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the late nineteenth century will not startle historians. Scholars have long noted Stowe's racialist sentimentalizing of the enslaved, which alienated twentieth-century African American readers who did not share her evangelical temperament and could see little admirable in Uncle Tom's self-sacrifice. Nor is it surprising that the radical egalitarianism of Stowe's novel could be upended in the 1890s when read by white Americans who condemned Reconstruction efforts to uplift freedmen and women and no longer remembered the role of slavery and emancipation in the Civil War's outcome. More valuable are Hochman's efforts to incorporate the reading experiences of the unpublished and “disempowered” (21)—children, African Americans, immigrants—who left traces of how they read and understood Uncle Tom's Cabin in letters, diaries, notebooks, and marginalia. If by 1900 “Uncle Tom's Cabin was better known than read” (152) among white readers, African Americans read the novel intensely, passionately, and personally. In this way Hochman's book complements David S. Reynolds's Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America (2011), which tracks often racist postbellum mutations of the novel in theatrical and other sites of popular culture and yet credits black performers in such shows with furtively preserving the story's radical emancipationist message. Hochman's evidence of disempowered readers sustaining the novel's subversive potential in a modern environment of white supremacy underscores the value of considering both the agency of readers and the influence of the text and context in the histories of a book. Her cultural history of race, reading, and childhood contextualizes the strange career of Stowe's novel, but Hochman remains sensitive throughout to the individual emotional and psychological experiences of reading it. After 1900, the shrug of white readers contrasted with the “feverish intensity” (251) with which African American readers such as James Weldon Johnson devoured the story.

Like Hochman, Mark Storey in Rural Fictions, Urban Realities treats mostly familiar texts, in this case the works usually identified with “regional” writers from the last three decades of the nineteenth century: Hamlin Garland, Booth Tarkington, William Dean Howells, Sarah Orne Jewett, and many others. For historians, his work initially may seem too literary in conception as he addresses controversies over genre categories and shows little interest in either the writers or the persons who read their works, but there remain good reasons to consider his innovative analysis. Scholars are sometimes prone to read urban fiction (the work of Theodore Dreiser, for instance) to understand the experience of becoming modern and rural fiction to understand the ethical and historical position on which opponents of the corporate and urban order staked (and lost) their future. Storey's close readings of these works confound these tendencies by uncovering “traces of modernity” (168) at play where they are least expected, written virtually into the genetic code of fiction's representations of the rural. Instead of providing sanctuary from modernity, Storey argues, rural fiction discloses the degree to which modern processes penetrated even the literature of an alternative way of life. He proposes a counterintuitive answer to the question of where best to study how Gilded Age literature represented the experience of becoming modern: not in fictional works about the city, but in those about the countryside.

Storey steers clear of the two established lenses through which rural fiction usually is viewed—the pastoral and the regional—because of the way in which they reinforce the binary of the country versus the city. He proposes an alternative organization that recognizes the connections joining instead of dividing rural and urban modes of experience, “a nonregional concept of the rural altogether” (11). Storey devotes a chapter to each of five themes—the railroad, the circus, the country doctor, lynching, and utopia—that appear across a broad swath of rural fiction regardless of regional setting or origin and reveal the interweaving of rural and urban in representations of rural geography. In such narratives the spatial boundary between country and city breaks down, according to Storey. Fictionalized rural settings disclose the railroads' rationalization of time and space, the mass entertainment and spectatorship of traveling circuses, and debates about the traditional and scientific basis of sound medical knowledge. Even the utopian fantasies that imagine a better rural world to come cannot frame an alternative life without the modern elements of the city.

The innovation of Storey's argument for the modernism of rural fiction may be limited by his reliance on a historiography represented best by Alan Trachtenberg's The Incorporation of America (1982), which envisages the totalizing hegemony of Gilded Age corporate capitalism. Storey's chapter on railroads, for instance, describes the railways' modernizing effect—integrating and rationalizing markets, time, and space—in a way that Richard White's Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (2011) has called into question. The railroad leaders who powered Gilded Age capitalism, White contends, were not professional and bureaucratic architects of the modern corporate order but reckless credit manipulators and inept businessmen who made personal fortunes building “inefficient, costly, dysfunctional corporations” (xxvi). If White's argument is accepted, rural fiction's inclusion of the modern in its narratives may have been as important for fomenting the myth of the rational modern corporate order as it was for reflecting its historical reach into the countryside.

Even if his depiction of modern America is too familiar, Storey does for rural fiction what Charles Postel has done for its political contemporary, the Populist movement. Postel's The Populist Vision (2007) challenges the long-standing interpretations of agrarian radicalism as either the hopeless utopianism of an aggrieved petty bourgeoisie or the hopeful revival of alternative producerist values against the forces of market capitalism. According to Postel, Populists were not backward looking in either sense but modernizers of rural life who believed in progress and sought to enlist government in the organization of markets to their and, they said, the nation's advantage. The farmers and lecturers of The Populist Vision would not have been blind to the elements of the modern in rural fiction that Storey makes visible.

At the end of his book, Storey describes himself as a kind of archaeologist rooting about the texts of late nineteenth-century novels in search of buried “traces of modernity.” A similar comparison works for Hochman in her work with Uncle Tom's Cabin, although what she unearths are the persistent traces of Stowe's antislavery novel hidden in the diverse reading communities of the time. As different as these two books are in their approaches to the history of late nineteenth-century literature, both demonstrate the important work that fiction contributed in the making of a modern America.