Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies, and Bibliomania

Acknowledgements.

Introduction: Anatomy of Reading.

(Books; Bibliomania; Bodies).

1. A History of Reading.

(From Reading Aloud to Reading Silently; From Monastic to Scholastic Reading; Reading in Solitude; From Intensive to Extensive Reading).

2. The Material Conditions of Reading.

(Expressive Function of Print; Instability of the Textual Object; Histories of Textual Transmission; From Manuscript to Typographic Culture; from Print to Hypermedia Culture).

3. The Physiology of Consumption.

(Side-effects of Reading; Reading-Fever; Reading Addiction; Modernity and the Assault on the Senses; Eye-Strain and Eye-Hunger; Film-Fever; Dazzling the Audience; Dizzy in Hyperspace; (Dis)Embodied in Cyberspace; Passive Consumers).

4. The Reader in Fiction.

(Dangers of Reading; The Tearful Reader; The Frightened Reader; The Passionate Reader; Pathology of Reading; Reading Games; The Danger of a Future without Books; Multisensory Media).

5. The Role of Affect in Literary Criticism.

(Reading with/out Pathos; Docere-Delectare-Movere; From Reader to Author to Text; Disinterested and Contemplative Reading; Close Reading; Reading for Sense rather than Sensation).

6. The Reader in Theory.

(Un/Readability; A Priori Conditions of Reading; Controlling Readers’ Responses; Reading Expectations; Conventions of Reading; Interpretive Communities; Failure of Reading; Misreading; The Reader as Writer; The Politics of Difference).

7. Sexual Politics of Reading.

(The Resisting Reader; Black Women Readers; Empirical Audiences; Active Consumers; "Low-/Middle-/Highbrow" Reading; Embodied Reading; Reading as/like a Woman; The Feminisation of the Reader).

Conclusion: Materialist Readings.

Notes.

References and Bibliography.

Index