Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies, and Bibliomania
Karin Littau
Why do literary theorists see reading as an act of dispassionate textual analysis and meaning production, when historical evidence shows that readers have often read excessively, obsessively, and for sensory stimulation? Posing these and other questions, this is the first major work to bring insights from book history to bear on literary history and theory. In so doing, the book charts a compelling and innovative history of theories of reading.
While literary theorists have greatly contributed to our understanding of the text-reader relation, they have rarely taken into account that the relation between a book and a reader is ... Read more
Each chapter places the reader in specific disciplinary and historical contexts: literature, criticism, philosophy, cultural history, bibliography, film, new media. Overall, the history recounted in this book points to a split between modern literary study which regards reading as a reducibly mental activity, and a tradition reaching back to antiquity which assumed that reading was not only about sense-making but also about sensation.
Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies and Bibliomania will be essential reading for all students and scholars of literary theory and history as well as of great interest to students of the history of the book and new media.
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About Karin Littau
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