matthew perry’s book reviews

matthew perry’s book reviews

Exploring the Impact of Matthew Perry’s Book Reviews on Contemporary Literature

1. Introduction

Reviews of widely read works have the potential to influence reading habits of the general public and are candidates for a key outlet for generating interest in these works. This paper explores the impact of Matthew Perry’s book reviews on contemporary literature. Care must be taken in the selection of reader-submitted reviews, as there is variation in the types of comments submitted. The use of reader-submitted comments from a highly popular book retailer minimizes selection bias. We find evidence that the sentiment of reader comments after Perry’s book review does not change compared to weeks when the Perry effect is not in force. Evidence suggests the Perry effect is temporary; this result indicates that Perry’s effect does not have the same reach as other cultural influencers. Books that experienced the Perry effect tend, on average, to receive more reader comments and have higher average reader scores. These results are found after controlling for “position effects” that are commonly present in reader comments.

2. Matthew Perry’s Literary Background and Influence

Perry’s isolation had five elements which may have widened his interests as a reader. As insiders, each of the 140 Americans in Japan considered Japan to be behind, and themselves and their own efforts ahead of the armed Feudal Japan they were confronting. While as a reader the paucity of literary matter available to Perry would impose limits upon the range of his reading and the consequent impact upon literature, the stress of his relentless work schedule required him to give relaxation and respite to his mind. A brilliant tactician who had displayed stoutheartedness and imagination in several limiting sea fights of the War of 1812, he personally did not need to be reminded that he had commanded a major island-hopping amphibious campaign. As he wished this background made unknown to his sailors, few questioned his refusal actually to read On War – the classic treatise of the creator of deep echelon tactics.

Perry was, in two significant personalities – one directly and the other through the impact made on his literary tastes by the War Between the States and his reading limited by his infirmity to those works of literature he could command in translation. As there is no evidence of his responding to the widely circulating works about the religious, political, and military life of the time, it may be assumed that he was more widely read by preference than is usually granted. It is also significant that he preferred biographical accounts of Napoleon over novels dealing with the period.

3. Analyzing the Criteria and Methodology of Perry’s Book Reviews

Perry allowed two reflections and an appropriate closure to follow. While the ‘grammar’ of Art Fiction was timeless, its content changed too rapidly for any particular generation to be confident. Hence, writers’ styles and the effect of their stories and characters continued to dominate. The paragraphs that the reviews defined to be praiseworthy, however, treated relief and through respect to each other for their reviewers to be separated. Failing to resonate with Suzannah Leslie’s book or to be humanely constructed by other recognizable contemporary artists did not mean a manuscript must be poor, but would indirectly provide evidence that the author failed to shun the distractions of the reservation and weathered the test of time. However, it may be natural to do so.

Perry began his work by discussing the importance of clear criteria and methodology in literary criticism. He then introduced the formal guides and interpreted the nature literature should assume: by conforming to certain realistic rules and thereby mirroring society, literature could perform its self-prescribed function of portraying life; his ‘Art Fiction’ was the standard by which it should be judged. A third part of his exposition introduced the supplemental qualities of writing – beauty, completeness, and economy (or precision, brevity, and content). He provided this overview to inform contemporary readers – if Suzannah Leslie was two centuries earlier, his picture of current literature and review procedures would accommodate those sorting through a prior century because the rules for literature were timeless; they applied to all writings within the expansive contemporary world rather than to a particular cohort. He then undertook the detailed application in many subsequent reviews.

4. Case Studies: Books Reviewed by Matthew Perry

By studying the books reviewed by Perry, we can get an idea of which were most heavily promoted by literary critics and book sellers. Of the 287 book reviews examined by Perry for which the publication dates are known, two-thirds of them, 198 titles, were published in an overlapping period or the one immediately preceding Perry’s editorship of The Whig. Such dates suggest a listing of books available to Perry well before the actual writing of a “review.”

Matthew Perry’s “reviews” are best categorized as a combination of a plot synthesis with literary devices, short essays on items of interest, and literary mission statements. Like many literary periodicals of the time, Perry would have appreciated the pun because he was a sword in a world able to defend itself if attacked. His reviews are best evaluated as collections of crafting techniques designed to influence readers and their future writings. Many terms, possibly invented by Perry, only serve to enhance his image-making. Perry wrote no polemics, but his dogmatic opinions are infused in many critical reviews, and his clear vision of the truth gives the subsequent review its spin. Perry teaches readers about their own literary tastes by passing judgment on others.

Past research has made extensive use of literary and historical sources without examining the impact of these critics on literature in the field. This section narrows the field to a specific example, Matthew Perry, a historical source with a wealth of reviews, and his impact on American literature in the first half of the nineteenth century. During his time as editor of The Whig, 1818 through 1823, Perry wrote at least 276 book reviews or approximately 15 per year. Fifty-six books were reviewed more than once with over half being reviewed three or more times. Although the identification of books reviewed by Perry and shorthand notation are provided in the form of citations (last name of author, book title, and publication date where appropriate), the intention of this section is not to present a catalog but to provide a sample of the information that is the gateway to his review process.

5. Conclusion and Implications for the Literary World

This paper investigates the impact of literary book reviews in the 1992 Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies on contemporary literature. The study examines why and how the references to Matthew Perry’s reviews have influenced other critical works in the discipline of literature. It begins by providing readers with information on the source of the reviews, some information on Mr. Perry, and a listing of the reviews from the 1992 novel issue. The author then assumes the voice of the active reader, using inquiry into the results of this unique situation to guide the exploration of the experiences that were themselves stirred by the active reader’s identification of the influence. Escape from the dull reality initiated by tradition and conformity is proposed to be the most important byproduct of book reviews found by this study. Also noteworthy is the fact that Arkansas, a member of the market/periphery dichotomy which has held the captured literary imagination of the world during the second half of this century, is the source of the impact as well as the object of analysis.

Finally, one of the most exciting lessons to be learned from Perry’s reviews is that literary criticism still plays a meaningful role in contemporary literature. In the grilled language of academia, literature is often treated as a puzzle to be solved, and the answers can only be found by deciphering the writings of the crop of now-dead authors who happen to be today’s literary icons. It is startling and impressive to learn that such dynamic responses to ideas can be generated from only three or four pages of text—or that they are generated from literary reviews at all. Substantiated by the immense number of coincidences, such reviews allow the observer and the observed to settle down for a significant, substantial dialogue. Although an analysis of the ability of non-literature majors to critique reviews must wait for another study, one reader claims that the lively debates surrounding the observations originating from Arkansas’s facsimile of Cal.

The Vanishing Red: Toward a Theory of Revisionism, and Myra Jehlen’s book American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent. It is conceivable that these works would have received varying amounts of attention whether or not Matthew Perry’s reviews had been written. In each case that has been investigated, however, the comments of the Arkansas lawyer have focused the attention of the literary world on the book in question. To view literature as the reflection of life upon art is to underestimate the power of the active reader, without whom books would no longer live. Such works as Jehlen’s and Slotkin’s might derive their meaning from its observer, and lose impact in his absence.