Wadsworth, Sarah 1963-

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Wadsworth, Sarah 1963-

PERSONAL:

Born 1963.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of English, Marquette University, P.O. Box 1881, Milwaukee, WI 53201-1881. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Previously worked in publishing; Marquette University, Helen Way Klinger College of Arts and Sciences, Milwaukee, WI, assistant professor of English.

WRITINGS:

In the Company of Books: Literature and Its "Classes" in Nineteenth-Century America, University of Massachusetts Press (Amherst, MA), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

Sarah Wadsworth serves as an assistant professor of English at the Helen Way Klinger College of Arts and Sciences at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Wadsworth's In the Company of Books: Literature and Its "Classes" in Nineteenth-Century America examines the publishing industry in the nineteenth century, particularly the publishing of literary works. She looks at the evolution of targeted marketing of books to appropriate readers, and the idea that not all readers were interested in the same types of books, based on their sex, age, economic standing, politics, and education. Charles C. Nash, in a review for the Library Journal, praised Wadsworth's effort, calling her book a "vastly informative story of how American publishing found ways to target individual reading publics," and concluding that the volume is a "little gem." Wadworth credits her earlier experience in the publishing industry, on the editorial end of the business, with sparking her idea for the book, which grew out of her doctoral thesis. On the Marquette University Web site, Wadsworth elaborates: "Trying to figure out which books to publish and how to get the right books into the right hands made me wonder how authors and publishers in nineteenth-century America dealt with similar challenges."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Library Journal, September 1, 2006, Charles C. Nash, review of In the Company of Books: Literature and Its "Classes" in Nineteenth-Century America, p. 147.

Reference & Research Book News, November 1, 2006, review of In the Company of Books.