Rate My Professor Annika Bautz

Annika is Professor of nineteenth-century literature. Her work focuses on book history, particularly reception studies, and centres on notions of canonicity and popularity. It asks how the quantitative and qualitative receptions of authors vary across centuries and cultures as readers bring the concerns of their own times to their interactions with a text, receive them in new ways, create new interpretations and derive new meanings. Her current monograph studies the reception of Edward Bulwer Lytton’s medieval romances for what their appeal can tell us about the receiving culture and its publishing industry, interrogating how nineteenth- and twentieth-century mentalities allowed the myths the novels contained to live on to today. Previous work considers the afterlives of Jane Austen, the diverse and changing approaches to her and her writings through the centuries, and what these approaches tell us about each receiving culture, including our own. Selected publications include Austen in a Competitive Literary Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Editions (2024), Bicentennial Essays on Jane Austen’s Afterlives (2021), and The Reception of Jane Austen and Walter Scott (2007). She has also contributed chapters and co-edited volumes on transatlantic literature and Victorian judgment.