“The Look of Reading is Garrett Stewart at his indefatigable best. A characteristically rich, densely argued, often brilliantly observed consideration of pictures of reading and their transformations under the pressures of modernity.”
— Michael Fried, Johns Hopkins University
“A picture of someone reading: who would have imagined that this seemingly commonplace subject in Western art could take us so far into the enigmatic relations between word and image, self and other, life and death, the sacred and profane? Garrett Stewart’s new book is a work of ardent imagination, unimpeachable scholarship, and flaring, often pyrotechnic, brilliance. To read what he says about looking, indeed to look with him at Western art’s compulsive “scenes” of reading, is to see far and deep into literacy itself, and to appreciate anew the astonishing impact the written word has had on both human culture and modern subjectivity. A sumptuous, untrammeled, and inspiring work of intellectual discovery.”
— Terry Castle, Stanford University
“A formidable, remarkably wide-ranging, erudite, and powerfully original study of a phenomenon that vividly straddles the very border between literature and visual art.”
— James Heffernan, Dartmouth College
“This book is as fully interdisciplinary as the visual genre it defines is radically intermedial, and the extraordinary level of synergy that Stewart’s exposition sustains is enough to animate a humanist’s dream of cold fusion. Here are virtuoso readings of dozens of panels, canvases, and photographs, linked into a strongly theorized story, four centuries long, about the way artists poising the depicted reader at an interart crossroads under incessant technological and social reconstruction have made her depict a lot more than that. Stewart’s vividly meditated instances show what promise attaches to mixed-media genre study, in pursuit of which his combined gifts of deep learning and high ingenuity will set a bracing standard.”<Herbert Tucker, University of Virginia>
— Herbert Tucker, University of Virginia
"Stewart has a superlatively alert eye for meanings and visual echoes in the pictures he is discussing. . . . This book is very well designed and produced, and lavishly illustrated. . . . It is a tribute to The Look of Reading that, long though it is, it prompts one's curiosity to know more."
— Sebastian Carter, Times Literary Supplement
"This is a book that every thinking person will want to read and look at. . . . [Stewart's subject] is not just an artistic tradition but also the compilation and commodification of that tradition at the moment when digital media are threatening to overtake the iconic book. His is one of those rare arguments that will change the way we see the world, and the canvas, and the page."
— Leah Price, Victorian Studies
"The book is a stylistic tour de force. . . . Stewart combines scholarly erudition and an at times stunning degree of theoretical and analytical sophistication with the intelligently playful style of an essay. . . . An admirable contribution to scholarship in virtually every respect: it investigates in great depth a previously underexplored topic and genre that allows for multidisciplinary engagement. It sets a very high standard and will without any doubt guide future work on this topic for years to come. The book is original in the best way, happily entering into dialogue with existing scholarship while at the same time significantly going beyond it."
— Sabine Gross, Poetics Today
"The Look of Reading is notable not only for its theoretical underpinnings and its historical breadth but above all for the depth and precision with which Stewart looks at individual paintings to work out the ideas guiding his book. One rarely encounters such a superb balance of theory and close reading in either art history or literary study. . . . Here and elsewhere Stewart has created an oeuvre that situates him as one of the finest, most probing thinkers working on problems of aesthetics today."
— Herbert Lindenberger, MLQ
