James L. Machor is an Emeritus Professor of English at Kansas State University. He is the author of Reading Fiction in Antebellum America: Informed Response and Reception Histories, 1820-1865 (2011) and Pastoral Cities: Urban Ideals and the Symbolic Landscape of America (1987). He has edited Readers in History: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Contexts of Response (1993) and co-edited Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies (2001) and New Directions in American Reception Study (2008). He is also the senior co-editor of Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History, the peer-reviewed journal of the Reception Study Society.