Raving
McKenzie Wark
Duke University Press, 2023 What is an art of life for what feels like the end of a world? In Raving McKenzie Wark takes readers into the undisclosed locations of New York’s thriving underground queer and trans rave scene. Techno, first and always a Black music, invites fresh sonic and temporal possibilities for this era of diminishing futures. Raving to techno is an art and a technique at which queer and trans bodies might be particularly adept but which is for anyone who lets the beat seduce them. Extending the rave’s sensations, situations, fog, lasers, drugs, and pounding sound systems onto the page, Wark invokes a trans practice of raving as a timely aesthetic for dancing in the ruins of this collapsing capital.
The Raw and the Cooked: Mythologiques, Volume 1
Claude Lévi-Strauss
University of Chicago Press, 1983 "Lévi-Strauss is a French savant par excellence, a man of extraordinary sensitivity and human wisdom . . . a deliberate stylist with profound convictions and convincing arguments. . . . [The Raw and the Cooked] adds yet another chapter to the tireless quest for a scientifically accurate, esthetically viable, and philosophically relevant cultural anthropology. . . . [It is] indispensable reading."—Natural History
Raw Edges: A Memoir
Phyllis Barber
University of Nevada Press, 2012 When Phyllis Barber’s thirty-three-year marriage ended, she had to redefine herself as a woman, a mother, and an artist. Raw Edges is her moving account of the “lean years” that followed her divorce. It is interwoven with a narrative of the marriage of two gifted people that begins with “sealing” in a Mormon temple, endures through the birth of four sons and the development of two careers, and founders when the couple’s personal needs no longer match their aspirations or the rigid strictures of Mormon life. Raw Edges reflects the predicament that many women experience as their marriages disintegrate and they fail to achieve their own expectations as well as those set by their society and their faith. It is also a story of hope, of how a woman overcome by grief and confusion eventually finds a new approach to life.
Raw Goods Inventory
Emily Rosko
University of Iowa Press, 2006 In Raw Goods Inventory, Emily Rosko gives us a poetic inventory in a virtuosic display of voices and accents. The poems come with sharp elbows and knees; they are nomadic, acquisitive, dispersive, and diffractive. More elementally, Rosko's poems contain the scattered bric-a-brac of the imagination, with goods that range from a dud egg to genetic hybrids, from Marian iconography to pigs at a state fair. She offers honest embodiments of anxiety, awkwardness, and boredom, as she also recasts with wit and grace the standard poetic fare: love, death, and disappointment. Idiomatic, raw, and skewed in the best possible way, Rosko's poetry manages to speak to us---with arresting lyric gusto---of familiar things.
 Raw Material: Producing Pathology in Victorian Culture
Erin O'Connor
Duke University Press, 2000 Raw Material analyzes how Victorians used the pathology of disease to express deep-seated anxieties about a rapidly industrializing England’s relationship to the material world. Drawing on medicine, literature, political economy, sociology, anthropology, and popular advertising, Erin O’Connor explores “the industrial logic of disease,” the dynamic that coupled pathology and production in Victorian thinking about cultural processes in general, and about disease in particular.
O’Connor focuses on how four particularly troubling physical conditions were represented in a variety of literature. She begins by exploring how Asiatic cholera, which reached epidemic proportions on four separate occasions between 1832 and 1865, was thought to represent the dangers of cultural contamination and dissolution. The next two chapters concentrate on the problems breast cancer and amputation posed for understanding gender. After discussing how breast cancer was believed to be caused by the female body’s intolerance to urban life, O'Connor turns to men’s bodies, examining how new prosthetic technology allowed dismembered soldiers and industrial workers to reconstruct themselves as productive members of society. The final chapter explores how freak shows displayed gross deformity as the stuff of a new and improved individuality. Complicating an understanding of the Victorian body as both a stable and stabilizing structure, she elaborates how Victorians used disease as a messy, often strategically unintelligible way of articulating the uncertainties of chaotic change. Over the course of the century, O’Connor shows, the disfiguring process of disease became a way of symbolically transfiguring the self. While cholera, cancer, limb loss, and deformity incapacitated and even killed people, their dramatic symptoms provided opportunities for imaginatively adapting to a world where it was increasingly difficult to determine not only what it meant to be human but also what it meant to be alive.
Raw Material will interest an audience of students and scholars of Victorian literature, cultural history, and the history of medicine.
 Raw Material: Working Wool in the West
Stephany Wilkes
Oregon State University Press, 2018 Follow a sweater with an "Italian Merino" label back far enough and chances are its life began not in Milan, but in Montana. Many people want to look behind the label and know where their clothes come from, but the textile supply chain-one of the most toxic on the planet-remains largely invisible. In Raw Material, Stephany Wilkes tells the story of American wool through her own journey to becoming a certified sheep shearer.
What begins as a search for local yarn becomes a dirty, unlikely, and irresistible side job. Wilkes leaves her high tech job for a way of life considered long dead in the American West. Along the way, she meets ornery sheep that weigh more than she does, carbon-sequestering ranchers, landless grazing operators, rare breed stewards, and small-batch yarn makers struggling with drought, unfair trade agreements, and faceless bureaucracies as they work to bring eco-friendly fleece to market.
Raw Material demonstrates that the back must break to clothe the body, and that excellence often comes by way of exhaustion. With humor and humility, Wilkes follows wool from the farm to the factory, through the hands of hardworking Americans trying to change the culture of clothing. Her story will appeal to anyone interested in the fiber arts or the textile industry, and especially to environmentally conscious consumers, as it extends the concerns of the sustainable food movement to fleece, fiber, and fashion.
Raw Silk: Poems
Meena Alexander
Northwestern University Press, 2004 A deeply moving collection from a poet who crosses borders New York City poet Meena Alexander was born in Allahabad, India and divided her childhood between India and the Sudan. From her cross-cultural perspective, Alexander writes with moving intensity of post-September 11 events as she evokes violence and civil strife, love, despair, and a hard-won hope. This autobiographical cycle of poems reflects the surrealism of such a life, and is shot through with the frissons of pleasure and pain, of beauty and tension, that mark a truly global identity.
 Rawlsian Political Analysis: Rethinking the Microfoundations of Social Science
Paul Clements
University of Notre Dame Press, 2012
In Rawlsian Political Analysis: Rethinking the Microfoundations of Social Science, Paul Clements develops a new, morally grounded model of political and social analysis as a critique of and improvement on both neoclassical economics and rational choice theory. What if practical reason is based not only on interests and ideas of the good, as these theories have it, but also on principles and sentiments of right? The answer, Clements argues, requires a radical reorientation of social science from the idea of interests to the idea of social justice.
According to Clements, systematic weaknesses in neoclassical economics and rational choice theory are due to their limited model of choice. According to such theories in the utilitarian tradition, all our practical decisions aim to maximize the satisfaction of our interests. These neo-utilitarian approaches focus on how we promote our interests, but Clements argues, our ideas of right, cognitively represented in principles, contribute independently and no less fundamentally to our practical decisions.
The most significant challenge to utilitarianism in the last half century is found in John Rawls’s Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, in which Rawls builds on Kant's concept of practical reason. Clements extends Rawls's moral theory and his critique of utilitarianism by arguing for social analysis based on the Kantian and Rawlsian model of choice. To illustrate the explanatory power of his model, he presents three detailed case studies: a program analysis of the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, a political economy analysis of the causes of poverty in the Indian state of Bihar, and a problem-based analysis of the ethics and politics of climate change. He concludes by exploring the broad implications of social analysis grounded in a concept of social justice.
“Paul Clements’s Rawlsian Political Analysis mounts an important intervention into the philosophy of the social sciences, challenging the tired fact/value, empirical/normative binaries that continue to impoverish social analysis. His insistence that social analysis must engage both facts and norms, the empirical and the normative, the good and the right, interest and principle—and that empirical social scientists must engage constructively on questions of autonomy and social justice—is noble and ultimately essential if social science is to justify its place in the years to come.” —Fonna Forman-Barzilai, University of California, San Diego
 Ray Bradbury
David Seed
University of Illinois Press, 2015 As much as any individual, Ray Bradbury brought science fiction's ideas into the mainstream. Yet he transcended the genre in both form and popularity, using its trappings to explore timely social concerns and the kaleidoscope of human experience while in the process becoming one of America's most beloved authors.
David Seed follows Bradbury's long career from the early short story masterpieces through his work in a wide variety of broadcast and film genres to the influential cultural commentary he spread via essays, speeches, and interviews. Mining Bradbury's classics and hard-to-find archival, literary, and cultural materials, Seed analyzes how the author's views on technology, authoritarianism, and censorship affected his art; how his Midwest of dream and dread brought his work to life; and the ways film and television influenced his creative process and visually-oriented prose style. The result is a passionate statement on Bradbury's status as an essential literary writer deserving of a place in the cultural history of his time.
Ray Bradbury Unbound
Jonathan R. Eller
University of Illinois Press, 2020 In Ray Bradbury Unbound, Jonathan R. Eller continues the story begun in his acclaimed Becoming Ray Bradbury, following the beloved author's evolution from a short story master to a multi-media creative force and outspoken visionary. At the height of his powers as a poetic prose stylist, Bradbury shifted his creative attention to film and television, where new successes gave him an enduring platform as a compelling cultural commentator. His passionate advocacy validated the U.S. space program's mission, extending his pivotal role as a chronicler of human values in an age of technological wonders. Informed by many years of interviews with Bradbury as well as an unprecedented access to personal papers and private collections, Ray Bradbury Unbound provides the definitive portrait of how a legendary American author helped shape his times.
 A Ray of Light in a Sea of Dark Matter
Keeton, Charles
Rutgers University Press, 2015 What’s in the dark? Countless generations have gazed up at the night sky and asked this question—the same question that cosmologists ask themselves as they study the universe. The answer turns out to be surprising and rich. The space between stars is filled with an exotic substance called “dark matter” that exerts gravity but does not emit, absorb, or reflect light. The space between galaxies is rife with “dark energy” that creates a sort of cosmic antigravity causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. Together, dark matter and dark energy account for 95 percent of the content of the universe. News reporters and science journalists routinely talk about these findings using terms that they assume we have a working knowledge of, but do you really understand how astronomers arrive at their findings or what it all means? Cosmologists face a conundrum: how can we study substances we cannot see, let alone manipulate? A powerful approach is to observe objects whose motion is influenced by gravity. Einstein predicted that gravity can act like a lens to bend light. Today we see hundreds of cases of this—instances where the gravity of a distant galaxy distorts our view of a more distant object, creating multiple images or spectacular arcs on the sky. Gravitational lensing is now a key part of the international quest to understand the invisible substance that surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the universe together. A Ray of Light in a Sea of Dark Matter offers readers a concise, accessible explanation of how astronomers probe dark matter. Readers quickly gain an understanding of what might be out there, how scientists arrive at their findings, and why this research is important to us. Engaging and insightful, Charles Keeton gives everyone an opportunity to be an active learner and listener in our ever-expanding universe. Watch a video with Charles Keeton: Watch video now. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc3byXNS1G0).
Rayford W. Logan and the Dilemma of the African American Intellectual
Kenneth Robert Janken
University of Massachusetts Press, 1993 This biography of the African-American activist and scholar, Rayford W. Logan, draws from his own work, letters, diaries and autobiography to create a portrait of a lesser-known member of the black scholarly elite in the mid-20th century.
 Raymond Carver: An Oral Biography
Sam Halpert
University of Iowa Press, 1995 Raymond Carver has become a literary icon for our time. When he died in 1988 at the age of fifty, he was acclaimed as the greatest influence on the American short story since Hemingway. Carver's friends were the stuff of legend as well. In this rich collection—greatly expanded from the earlier When We Talk about Raymond Carver—of interviews with close companions, acquaintances, and family, Sam Halpert has chronologically arranged the reminiscences of Carver's adult life, recalling his difficult “Bad Raymond” days through his second life as a recovering alcoholic and triumphantly successful writer. The result is a spirited Irish wake—toasts, anecdotes, lies, songs, confessions, laments—all beautifully orchestrated by Halpert into a very readable and moving narrative. These funny, poignant, intensely remembered interviews juxtapose personal anecdotes and enlightening criticism. Memory mixes with analysis, and a lively picture of Carver emerges as we hear different stories about him—of the same story told from different viewpoints. He is here presented as hero, victim, and even villain—Carver's readers will recognize the woof and warp of his stories in these affectionate narratives.
 Raza Studies: The Public Option for Educational Revolution
Edited by Julio Cammarota and Augustine Romero; Foreword by David Stovall
University of Arizona Press, 2014 The well-known and controversial Mexican American studies (MAS) program in Arizona’s Tucson Unified School District set out to create an equitable and excellent educational experience for Latino students. Raza Studies: The Public Option for Educational Revolution offers the first comprehensive account of this progressive—indeed revolutionary—program by those who created it, implemented it, and have struggled to protect it.
Inspired by Paulo Freire’s vision for critical pedagogy and Chicano activists of the 1960s, the designers of the program believed their program would encourage academic achievement and engagement by Mexican American students. With chapters by leading scholars, this volume explains how the program used “critically compassionate intellectualism” to help students become “transformative intellectuals” who successfully worked to improve their level of academic achievement, as well as create social change in their schools and communities.
Despite its popularity and success inverting the achievement gap, in 2010 Arizona state legislators introduced and passed legislation with the intent of banning MAS or any similar curriculum in public schools. Raza Studies is a passionate defense of the program in the face of heated local and national attention. It recounts how one program dared to venture to a world of possibility, hope, and struggle, and offers compelling evidence of success for social justice education programs.
 Razabilly: Transforming Sights, Sounds, and History in the Los Angeles Latina/o Rockabilly Scene
By Nicholas F. Centino
University of Texas Press, 2021 Vocals tinged with pain and desperation. The deep thuds of an upright bass. Women with short bangs and men in cuffed jeans. These elements and others are the unmistakable signatures of rockabilly, a musical genre normally associated with white male musicians of the 1950s. But in Los Angeles today, rockabilly's primary producers and consumers are Latinos and Latinas. Why are these "Razabillies" partaking in a visibly "un-Latino" subculture that's thought of as a white person's fixation everywhere else? As a Los Angeles Rockabilly insider, Nicholas F. Centino is the right person to answer this question. Pairing a decade of participant observation with interviews and historical research, Centino explores the reasons behind a Rockabilly renaissance in 1990s Los Angeles and demonstrates how, as a form of working-class leisure, this scene provides Razabillies with spaces of respite and conviviality within the alienating landscape of the urban metropolis. A nuanced account revealing how and why Los Angeles Latinas/os have turned to and transformed the music and aesthetic style of 1950s rockabilly, Razabilly offers rare insight into this musical subculture, its place in rock and roll history, and its passionate practitioners.
The Razorbacks: A Story of Arkansas Football
Orville Henry
University of Arkansas Press, 1996 From the humble beginnings in 1894, to the great programs of Frank Broyles, the National Championship in 1964, and Lou Holtz's Orange Bowl victory over Oklahoma in 1978, and then to Arkansas's recent re-entry into the national rankings with bowl invitations—the whole spectrum of Hog football is covered in this lively chronicle.
 R&D and Productivity: The Econometric Evidence
Zvi Griliches
University of Chicago Press, 1998 Zvi Griliches, a world-renowned pioneer in the field of productivity growth, has compiled in a single volume his pathbreaking research on R&D and productivity. Griliches addresses the relationship between research and development (R&D) and productivity, one of the most complex yet vital issues in today's business world. Using econometric techniques, he establishes this connection and measures its magnitude for firm-, industry-, and economy-level data.
Griliches began his studies of productivity growth during the 1950s, adding a variable of "knowledge stock" to traditional production function models, and his work has served as the point of departure for much of the research into R&D and productivity. This collection of essays documents both Griliches's distinguished career as well as the history of this line of thought.
As inputs into production increasingly taking the form of "intellectual capital" and new technologies that are not as easily measured as traditional labor and capital, the methods Griliches has refined and applied to R&D become crucial to understanding today's economy.
R&D, Patents and Productivity
Edited by Zvi Griliches
University of Chicago Press, 1984 Zvi Griliches, a world-renowned pioneer in the field of productivity growth, has compiled in a single volume his pathbreaking research on R&D and productivity. Griliches addresses the relationship between research and development (R&D) and productivity, one of the most complex yet vital issues in today's business world. Using econometric techniques, he establishes this connection and measures its magnitude for firm-, industry-, and economy-level data.
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The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2013 This is volume 41 issue 12 of Renaissance Drama. Renaissance Drama explores the rich variety of theatrical and performance traditions and practices in early modern Europe and intersecting cultures. The sole scholarly journal devoted to the full expanse of Renaissance theatre and performance, the journal publishes articles that extend the scope of our understanding of early modern playing, theatre history, and dramatic texts and interpretation, encouraging innovative theoretical and methodological approaches to these traditions, examining familiar works, and revisiting well-known texts from fresh perspectives.
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RDA Glossary
RDA Steering Committee (RSC)
American Library Association, 2020
 (Re:) Claiming Ballet
Edited by Adesola Akinleye
Intellect Books, 2021 Though ballet is often seen as a white, cis-heteropatriarchal form of dance, in fact it has been, and still is, shaped by artists from a much broader range of backgrounds. This collection looks beyond the mainstream, bringing to light the overlooked influences that continue to inform the culture of ballet. Essays illuminate the dance form’s rich and complex history and start much-needed conversations about the roles of class, gender normativity, and race, demonstrating that despite mainstream denial and exclusionary tactics, ballet thrives with “difference.”
With contributions from professional ballet dancers and teachers, choreographers, and dance scholars in Europe and the United States, the volume introduces important new thinkers and perspectives. An essential resource for the field of ballet studies and a major contribution to dance scholarship more broadly, (Re:) Claiming Ballet will appeal to academics, researchers, and scholars; dance professionals and practitioners; and anyone interested in the intersection of race, class, gender, and dance.
 Re Verse: Essays on Poetry and Poets
David R. Slavitt
Northwestern University Press, 2009 David R. Slavitt will tell you that he does not believe in literary criticism so much as in "remarks," which are more portable and, often, more enlightening. In this witty and unusual work, he remarks upon the life of a poet in the second half of the twentieth century, how it was--and how it is--to be an American writer.
Combining personal reminiscence with deft literary analysis, incisive biographical sketches, and, sometimes, literary gossip, these essays give new perspectives on the famous--such as Harold Bloom, Robert Penn Warren, Robert Frost, and Stephen Spender--and recover the charms of the near-forgotten--such as Dudley Fitts, Winfield Townley Scott, Merrill Moore and John Hall Wheelock. Slavitt writes with self-deprecating humor of his own literary education, and uses his impressive experience and erudition to illuminate the whims of poetic influence, passion, and reputation. With a refreshing honesty and considerable poise, he gives readers an enlightening view of the vast and ever-changing literary universe.
 Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education
Thomas J. Tobin
West Virginia University Press, 2018 Advocates for the rights of people with disabilities have worked hard to make universal design in the built environment “just part of what we do.” We no longer see curb cuts, for instance, as accommodations for people with disabilities, but perceive their usefulness every time we ride our bikes or push our strollers through crosswalks. This is also a perfect model for Universal Design for Learning (UDL), a framework grounded in the neuroscience of why, what, and how people learn. Tobin and Behling show that, although it is often associated with students with disabilities, UDL can be profitably broadened toward a larger ease-of-use and general diversity framework. Captioned instructional videos, for example, benefit learners with hearing impairments but also the student who worries about waking her young children at night or those studying on a noisy team bus. Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone is aimed at faculty members, faculty-service staff, disability support providers, student-service staff, campus leaders, and graduate students who want to strengthen the engagement, interaction, and performance of all college students. It includes resources for readers who want to become UDL experts and advocates: real-world case studies, active-learning techniques, UDL coaching skills, micro- and macro-level UDL-adoption guidance, and use-them-now resources.
 Reachable Stars: Patterns in the Ethnoastronomy of Eastern North America
George E. Lankford
University of Alabama Press, 2007 Modern Westerners say the lights in the sky are stars, but culturally they are whatever we humans say they are. Some say they are Forces that determine human lives, some declare they are burning gaseous masses, and some see them as reminders of a gloried past by which elders can teach and guide the young—mnemonics for narratives. Lankford’s volume focuses on the ancient North Americans and the ways they identified, patterned, ordered, and used the stars to light their culture and illuminate their traditions. They knew them as regions that could be visited by human spirits, and so the lights for them were not distant points of light, but “reachable stars.” Guided by the night sky and its constellations, they created oral traditions, or myths, that contained their wisdom and which they used to pass on to succeeding generations their particular world view. However, they did not all tell the same stories. This study uses that fact—patterns of agreement and disagreement—to discover prehistoric relationships between Indian groups. Which groups saw a constellation in the same way and told the same story? How did that happen? Although these preliterate societies left no written records, the mythic patterns across generations and cultures enable contemporary researchers to examine the differences in how they understood the universe—not as early scientists, but as creators of cosmic order. In the process of doing that, the myth-tellers left the footprints of their international cultural relationships behind them. Reachable Stars is the story of their stories.
 Reaching All Writers: A Pedagogical Guide for Evolving College Writing Classrooms
Joanne Baird Giordano
Utah State University Press, 2023 Reaching All Writers brings together decades of writing studies experience, research, and scholarship to help organize first-year writing courses around inclusive teaching practices and foundational concepts that support disciplinary learning for all college writers, including students who have been excluded from more selective higher-education institutions.
Using threshold concepts and transfer as a foundation, the authors provide an invaluable resource for multiple contexts: instructors working off the tenure track and/or at multiple institutions; two-year college programs without a writing program administrator; and writing program graduate teaching assistant training courses. Each chapter includes an overview of a threshold concept, disciplinary background readings, practical teaching strategies, assignment and learning activity ideas, assessment principles, examples from student and instructor perspectives, and questions for reflection and discussion.
Reaching All Writers describes effective teaching practices to help all college writing instructors, regardless of their institutional contexts, make changes that support equitable and inclusive learning opportunities—with a focus on teaching students whose backgrounds and learning experiences are different from those with more educational or economic privilege. Both new and experienced teachers adapting first-year college writing courses will find the book’s blend of practical strategies and disciplinary knowledge a useful companion for facilitating new classroom and program needs or designing new teaching assistant training courses.
Reaching Audiences: Distribution and Promotion of Alternative Moving Image
Julia Knight and Peter Thomas
Intellect Books, 2011 From Hollywood blockbusters to art films, distributors play an important role in getting films in front of audiences and thus in shaping the nature of film culture. Of central concern to Reaching Audiences are the distribution practices developed to counter Hollywood’s dominance of the marketplace, designed to ensure audiences have access to a more diverse moving image culture. Through a series of case studies, the book tracks the inventive distribution and exhibition initiatives developed over the last forty years by small companies on the periphery of the United Kingdom’s film industry—practices now being replicated by a new generation of digital distributors. Although largely invisible to outsiders, the importance of distribution networks is widely recognized in the industry, and this book is a key contribution to our understanding of the role they play.
 Reaching beyond Race
Paul M. Sniderman and Edward G. Carmines
Harvard University Press, 1997 If white Americans could reveal what they really think about race, without the risk of appearing racist, what would they say? In this elegantly written and innovative book, Paul Sniderman and Edward Carmines illuminate aspects of white Americans' thinking about the politics of race previously hidden from sight. And in a thoughtful follow-up analysis, they point the way toward public policies that could gain wide support and reduce the gap between black and white Americans.
Their discoveries will surprise pollsters and policymakers alike. The authors show that prejudice, although by no means gone, has lost its power to dominate the political thinking of white Americans. Concentrating on the new race-conscious agenda, they introduce a method of hidden measurement which reveals that liberals are just as angry over affirmative action as conservatives and that racial prejudice, while more common among conservatives, is more powerful in shaping the political thinking of liberals. They also find that the good will many whites express for blacks is not feigned but represents a genuine regard for blacks, which they will stand by even when given a perfectly acceptable excuse to respond negatively to blacks.
More crucially, Sniderman and Carmines show that the current impasse over race can be overcome if we remember what we once knew. The strongest arguments in behalf of equality for black Americans reach beyond race to the moral principles that give the issue of race itself a moral claim on us.
 Reaching for a New Deal: Ambitious Governance, Economic Meltdown, and Polarized Politics in Obama's First Two Years
Theda Skocpol
Russell Sage Foundation, 2011 During his winning presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised to counter rising economic inequality and revitalize America's middle-class through a series of wide-ranging reforms. His transformational agenda sought to ensure affordable healthcare; reform the nation's schools and make college more affordable; promote clean and renewable energy; reform labor laws and immigration; and redistribute the tax burden from the middle class to wealthier citizens. The Wall Street crisis and economic downturn that erupted as Obama took office also put U.S. financial regulation on the agenda. By the middle of President Obama's first term in office, he had succeeded in advancing major reforms by legislative and administrative means. But a sluggish economic recovery from the deep recession of 2009, accompanied by polarized politics and governmental deadlock in Washington, DC, have raised questions about how far Obama's promised transformations can go. Reaching for a New Deal analyzes both the ambitious domestic policy of Obama's first two years and the consequent political backlash—up to and including the 2010 midterm elections. Reaching for a New Deal opens by assessing how the Obama administration overcame intense partisan struggles to achieve legislative victories in three areas—health care reform, federal higher education loans and grants, and financial regulation. Lawrence Jacobs and Theda Skocpol examine the landmark health care bill, signed into law in spring 2010, which extended affordable health benefits to millions of uninsured Americans after nearly 100 years of failed legislative attempts to do so. Suzanne Mettler explains how Obama succeeded in reorienting higher education policy by shifting loan administration from lenders to the federal government and extending generous tax tuition credits. Reaching for a New Deal also examines the domains in which Obama has used administrative action to further reforms in schools and labor law. The book concludes with examinations of three areas—energy, immigration, and taxes—where Obama's efforts at legislative compromises made little headway. Reaching for a New Deal combines probing analyses of Obama's domestic policy achievements with a big picture look at his change-oriented presidency. The book uses struggles over policy changes as a window into the larger dynamics of American politics and situates the current political era in relation to earlier pivotal junctures in U.S. government and public policy. It offers invaluable lessons about unfolding political transformations in the United States.
 Reaching Higher: The Power of Expectations in Schooling
Rhona S. Weinstein
Harvard University Press, 2002 “She has a funny way of looking at you,” a fourth-grader told Rhona Weinstein about his teacher. “She gets that look and says ‘I am very disappointed in you.’ I hate it when she does that. It makes me feel like I’m stupid. Just crazy, stupid, dumb.” Even young children know what adults think of them. All too often, they live down to expectations, as well as up to them. This book is about the context in which expectations play themselves out.
Drawing upon a generation of research on self-fulfilling prophecies in education, including the author’s own extensive fieldwork in schools, Reaching Higher argues that our expectations of children are often too low. With compelling case studies, Weinstein shows that children typed early as “not very smart” can go on to accomplish far more than is expected of them by an educational system with too narrow a definition of ability and the way abilities should be nurtured. Weinstein faults the system, pointing out that teachers themselves are harnessed by policies that do not enable them to reach higher for all children.
Her analysis takes us beyond current reforms that focus on accountability for test results. With rich descriptions of effective classrooms and schools, Weinstein makes a case for a changed system that will make the most of every child and enable students and teachers to engage more meaningfully in learning.
Reaction to World News Events and the Influence of Mass Media in an Indian Village
Thomas Poffenberger and Shirley B. Poffenberger
University of Michigan Press, 1971 Our major research interest in the village under study was originally in the area of socialization practices, social change and variables related to fertility behavior. We had not planned a study of the diffusion of news events and villagers’ reactions to them. However, the Indian Government was considering the use of media for a major mass communication program, to propagate the idea of having small families through the use of family planning methods, and we believed it would be of value to examine any data that might be helpful in getting at least some feeling about what villagers read in the papers and what they heard on the radio, as well as their understanding of the information and their attitudes toward it. We subsequently asked questions about the use of mass media. [1]
 Reactionary Mathematics: A Genealogy of Purity
Massimo Mazzotti
University of Chicago Press, 2023 A forgotten episode of mathematical resistance reveals the rise of modern mathematics and its cornerstone, mathematical purity, as political phenomena.
The nineteenth century opened with a major shift in European mathematics, and in the Kingdom of Naples, this occurred earlier than elsewhere. Between 1790 and 1830 its leading scientific institutions rejected as untrustworthy the “very modern mathematics” of French analysis and in its place consolidated, legitimated, and put to work a different mathematical culture. The Neapolitan mathematical resistance was a complete reorientation of mathematical practice. Over the unrestricted manipulation and application of algebraic algorithms, Neapolitan mathematicians called for a return to Greek-style geometry and the preeminence of pure mathematics.
For all their apparent backwardness, Massimo Mazzotti explains, they were arguing for what would become crucial features of modern mathematics: its voluntary restriction through a new kind of rigor and discipline, and the complete disconnection of mathematical truth from the empirical world—in other words, its purity. The Neapolitans, Mazzotti argues, were reacting to the widespread use of mathematical analysis in social and political arguments: theirs was a reactionary mathematics that aimed to technically refute the revolutionary mathematics of the Jacobins. During the Restoration, the expert groups in the service of the modern administrative state reaffirmed the role of pure mathematics as the foundation of a newly rigorous mathematics, which was now conceived as a neutral tool for modernization. What Mazzotti’s penetrating history shows us in vivid detail is that producing mathematical knowledge was equally about producing certain forms of social, political, and economic order.
 Reactivating Elements: Chemistry, Ecology, Practice
Dimitris Papadopoulos, María Puig del la Bellacasa, and Natasha Myers, editors
Duke University Press, 2021 The contributors to Reactivating Elements examine chemicals as they mix with soil, air, water, and fire to shape Earth's troubled ecologies today. They invoke the elements with all their ambivalences as chemical categories, material substances, social forms, forces and energies, cosmological entities, and epistemic objects. Engaging with the nonlinear historical significance of elemental thought across fields—chemistry, the biosciences, engineering, physics, science and technology studies, the environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and cultural studies—the contributors examine the relationship between chemistry and ecology, probe the logics that render wind as energy, excavate affective histories of ubiquitous substances such as plastics and radioactive elements, and chart the damage wrought by petrochemical industrialization. Throughout, the volume illuminates how elements become entangled with power and control, coloniality, racism, and extractive productivism while exploring alternative paths to environmental destruction. In so doing, it rethinks the relationship between the elements and the elemental, human and more-than-human worlds, today’s damaged ecosystems and other ecologies to come.
Contributors. Patrick Bresnihan, Tim Choy, Joseph Dumit, Cori Hayden, Stefan Helmreich, Joseph Masco, Michelle Murphy, Natasha Myers, Dimitris Papadopoulos, María Puig de la Bellacasa, Astrid Schrader, Isabelle Stengers
 Reactivations: Essays on Performance and Its Documentation
Philip Auslander
University of Michigan Press, 2018 Most people agree that witnessing a live performance is not the same as seeing it on screen; however, most of the performances we experience are in recorded forms. Some aver that the recorded form of a performance necessarily distorts it or betrays it, focusing on the relationship between the original event and its recorded versions. By contrast, Reactivations focuses on how the audience experiences the performance, as opposed to its documentation. How does a spectator access and experience a
performance from its documentation? What is the value of performance documentation?
The book treats performance documentation as a specific discursive use of media that arose in the middle of the 20th century alongside such forms of performance as the Happening and that is different, both discursively and as a practice, from traditional theater and dance photography. Philip Auslander explores the phenomenal relationship between the spectator who experiences the performance from the document and the document itself. The document is not merely a secondary iteration of the original event but a vehicle that gives us meaningful access to the performance itself as an artistic work.
Reactor
Judith Vollmer
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004 Reactor gives voice to beloved and ruined American landscapes through extended meditations of an urban mystical wanderer.
Read and Tell Stories: For parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other loving adults
Rosie Cutrer
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2020 A handbook for adults who want to pass on family stories to children in their clan, also useful for elementary and middle school teachers, grandparents, faith educators, and day care programmers
 The Readability of the Past in Early Chinese Historiography
Wai-yee Li
Harvard University Press, 2007 The past becomes readable when we can tell stories and make arguments about it. When we can tell more than one story or make divergent arguments, the readability of the past then becomes an issue. Therein lies the beginning of history, the sense of inquiry that heightens our awareness of interpretation. How do interpretive structures develop and disintegrate? What are the possibilities and limits of historical knowledge?
This book explores these issues through a study of the Zuozhuan, a foundational text in the Chinese tradition, whose rhetorical and analytical self-consciousness reveals much about the contending ways of thought unfolding during the period of the text's formation (ca. 4th c. BCE). But in what sense is this vast collection of narratives and speeches covering the period from 722 to 468 BCE "historical"? If one can speak of an emergent sense of history in this text, Wai-yee Li argues, it lies precisely at the intersection of varying conceptions of interpretation and rhetoric brought to bear on the past, within a larger context of competing solutions to the instability and disintegration represented through the events of the 255 years covered by the Zuozhuan. Even as its accounts of proliferating disorder and disintegration challenge the boundaries of readability, the deliberations on the rules of reading in the Zuozhuan probe the dimensions of historical self-consciousness.
 A Readable Beowulf: The Old English Epic Newly Translated
Stanley B. Greenfield. Introduction by Alain Renoir
Southern Illinois University Press, 1982 Stanley B. Greenfield, one of the world’s foremost Anglo-Saxon scholars, writes of why, after more than thirty years of study, he undertook the Herculean task of rendering Beowulf into contemporary verse: “I wanted my translation to be not only faithful to the original but, as the late John Lennon would have put it, ‘A Poem in Its Own Write.’ I wanted it to ‘flow,’ to be easy to read, with the narrative movement of a modern prose story; yet to suggest the rhythmic cadences of the Old English poem. I wanted it both modern and Old English in its reflexes and sensibilities, delighting both the general reader and the Anglo-Saxon specialist. . . . I wanted it to reproduce the intoxication of aural contours which… might have pleased and amused warriors over their cups in the Anglo-Saxon mead-hall, or those monks in Anglo-Saxon monasteries who paid more attention to song and to stories of Ingeld than to the lector and the gospels.” Greenfield has succeeded to a remarkable degree in reaching his goals. An early reviewer of the manuscript, Daniel G. Calder of UCLA, wrote: “I find it the best translation of Beowulf. One of the great problems with other translations is that they make the reading of Beowulf difficult. Greenfield’s translation speeds along with considerable ease. . . Scholars will find the translation fascinating as an exercise in the successful recreating of various aspects of Old English poetic style.”
The Reader and the Detective Story
George N. Dove
University of Wisconsin Press, 1997 The Reader and the Detective Story is unique—it treats the detective story as a special case of reading, governed by special rules and shaped by a highly specialized formula. The method of interpretation is the application of the principles of response theory (especially those developed by Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wolfgang Iser, and Hans Robert Jauss) to the reading of a tale of detection.
George Dove demonstrates how the English soft-boiled mystery and the American private-eye story, although they have different settings and develop different plots, belong in the same subgenre and follow the same formula, inherited directly from Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”
 Reader as Accomplice: Narrative Ethics in Dostoevsky and Nabokov
Alexander Spektor
Northwestern University Press, 2021 Reader as Accomplice: Narrative Ethics in Dostoevsky and Nabokov argues that Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Nabokov seek to affect the moral imagination of their readers by linking morally laden plots to the ethical questions raised by narrative fiction at the formal level. By doing so, these two authors ask us to consider and respond to the ethical demands that narrative acts of representation and interpretation place on authors and readers. Using the lens of narrative ethics, Alexander Spektor brings to light the important, previously unexplored correspondences between Dostoevsky and Nabokov. Ultimately, he argues for a productive comparison of how each writer investigates the ethical costs of narrating oneself and others. He also explores the power dynamics between author, character, narrator, and reader. In his readings of such texts as “The Meek One” and The Idiot by Dostoevsky and Bend Sinister and Despair by Nabokov, Spektor demonstrates that these authors incite the reader’s sense of ethics by exposing the risks but also the possibilities of narrative fiction.
 The Reader as Peeping Tom: Nonreciprocal Gazing in Narrative Fiction and Film
Jeremy Hawthorn
Ohio State University Press, 2014 When we read a novel or watch a film, we become Peeping Toms. Spying on fictional characters, we can enjoy observing their private lives and most intimate secrets while safe in the knowledge that they are totally unaware of us. The Reader as Peeping Tom: Nonreciprocal Gazing in Narrative Fiction and Film, by Jeremy Hawthorn, examines the implications of this nonreciprocal relationship by focusing on works in which the relationships between characters are also nonreciprocal. Hawthorn focuses on four novelists and three filmmakers whose works are concerned with surveillance, spying, and voyeurism: Hawthorne, Dickens, Melville, Henry James, Hitchcock, Michael Powell, and Francis Ford Coppola.
Hawthorn suggests that while some literary and film narratives use the reader’s or viewer’s sense of all-seeing invulnerability to underwrite the various systems of control and surveillance that are depicted in the work, others associate such forms of nonreciprocal observation with impotence and impoverishment and thus critique political systems that legitimize surveillance. Hawthorn concludes that critics have underestimated the extent to which reader’s or viewer’s sense of disempowerment adds meaning to the experience of fiction and film and may encourage acceptance or criticism of spying and surveillance in the real world. The book questions benign views of the reader’s or spectator’s role as passive observer, and offers original and exciting readings of some key narrative texts.
 A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology: Religion and Justice
Edited by María Pilar Aquino, Daisy L. Machado, and Jeanette Rodríguez
University of Texas Press, 2002 Speaking for the growing community of Latina feminist theologians, the editors of this volume write, "With the emergence and growth of the feminist theologies of liberation, we no longer wait for others to define or validate our experience of life and faith.... We want to express in our own words our plural ways of experiencing God and our plural ways of living our faith. And these ways have a liberative tone." With twelve original essays by emerging and established Latina feminist theologians, this first-of-its-kind volume adds the perspectives, realities, struggles, and spiritualities of U.S. Latinas to the larger feminist theological discourse. The editors have gathered writings from both Roman Catholics and Protestants and from various Latino/a communities. The writers address a wide array of theological concerns: popular religion, denominational presence and attraction, methodology, lived experience, analysis of nationhood, and interpretations of life lived on a border that is not only geographic but also racial, gendered, linguistic, and religious.
Reader Of The Purple Sage: Essays On Western Writers And Environmental Literature
Ann Ronald
University of Nevada Press, 2003 Literary scholar Ann Ronald gathers her most notable published essays about Nevada, environmental writing, and Western American literature in one volume. These essays reflect Ronald’s wide-ranging interests. Here are deeply informed, critical essays on writers as diverse as Zane Gray, Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and Terry Tempest Williams, as well as the Tonopah Ladies—a group of literary women who found their voices in the unlikely setting of a mining boomtown—and on such varied topics as the image of Reno in nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction. Included are several recent essays in which Ronald thoughtfully discusses the burgeoning field of environmental writing, some of its principal themes and concerns, and its best-known practitioners.
 A Reader on International Media Piracy: Pirate Essays
Edited by Tilman Baumgärtel
Amsterdam University Press, 2015 Piracy is among the most prevalent and vexing issues of the digital age. In just the past decade, it has altered the music industry beyond recognition, changed the way people watch television, and made a dent in the buisness of the film and software industries. From MP3 files to recipes from French celebrity chefs to the jokes of American stand-up comedians, piracy is ubiquitous. And now piracy can even be an arbiter of taste, as seen in the decision by Netflix Netherlands to license heavily pirated shows.
In this unflinching analysis of piracy on the Internet and in the markets of the Global South, Tilman Baumgärtel brings together a collection of essays examining the economic, political, and cultural consequences of piracy. The contributors explore a wide array of topics, which include materiality and piracy in Rio de Janeiro; informal media distribution and the film experience in Hanoi, Vietnam; the infrastructure of piracy in Nigeria; the political economy of copy protection; and much more. Offering a theoretical background for future studies of piracy, A Reader in International Media Piracy is an important collection on the burning issue of the Internet Age.
 The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work
Louise M. Rosenblatt
Southern Illinois University Press, 1994 Louise M. Rosenblatt’s award-winning work continues increasingly to be read in a wide range of academic fields—literary criticism, reading theory, aesthetics, composition, rhetoric, speech communication, and education. Her view of the reading transaction as a unique event involving reader and text at a particular time under particular circumstances rules out the dualistic emphasis of other theories on either the reader or the text as separate and static entities. The transactional concept accounts for the importance of factors such as gender, ethnicity, culture, and socioeconomic context. Essential reading for the specialist, this book is also well suited for courses in criticism, critical theory, rhetoric, and aesthetics. Starting from the same nonfoundationalist premises, Rosenblatt avoids the extreme relativism of postmodern theories derived mainly from Continental sources. A deep understanding of the pragmatism of Dewey, James, and Peirce and of key issues in the social sciences is the basis for a view of language and the reading process that recognizes the potentialities for alternative interpretations and at the same time provides a rationale for the responsible reading of texts. The book has been praised for its lucid explanation of the multidimensional character of the reading process—evoking, interpreting, and evaluating the work. The nonliterary (efferent) and the literary (aesthetic) are shown not to be opposites but to represent a continuum of reading behaviors. The author amply illustrates her theoretical points with interpretations of varied texts. The epilogue carries further her critique of rival contemporary theories.
 The Readers' Advisory Guide to Genre Fiction
Neal Wyatt
American Library Association, 2018 Everyone’s favorite guide to fiction that’s thrilling, mysterious, suspenseful, thought-provoking, romantic, and just plain fun is back—and better than ever in this completely revamped and revised edition. A must for every readers’ advisory desk, this resource is also a useful tool for collection development librarians and students in LIS programs. Inside, RA experts Wyatt and Saricks - cover genres such as Psychological Suspense, Horror, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Romance, Mystery, Literary and Historical Fiction, and introduce the concepts of Adrenaline and Relationship Fiction;
- include everything advisors need to get up to speed on a genre, including its appeal characteristics, key authors, sure bets, and trends;
- demonstrate how genres overlap and connect, plus suggestions for guiding readers among genres; and
- tie genre fiction to the whole collection, including nonfiction, audiobooks, graphic novels, film and TV, poetry, and games.
Both insightful and comprehensive, this matchless guidebook will help librarians become familiar with many different fiction genres, especially those they do not regularly read, and aid library staff in connecting readers to books they’re sure to love.
 The Readers' Advisory Guide to Graphic Novels
Francisca Goldsmith
American Library Association, 2017 The first edition of this readers' advisory represented a pioneering effort to provide help and encouragement to librarians diving into this exciting format, and since then the popularity of graphic novels has continued apace. Goldsmith has updated her guide to encompass a bounty of new titles, authors, and styles, ensuring its continued usefulness as a tool for both RA and collection development. Suitable for newbies and hardcore fans alike, this book - sketches in the history of graphic novels, tracing their evolution and showing what makes them unique;
- explores traditional and cutting edge titles most friendly to children, teens, and adults, reflecting the burgeoning and maturing publishing efforts made for each of these audiences;
- discusses common themes, topics, and the place of diversity in graphic novels;
- gives in-depth guidance on ways to connect readers to titles they'll be sure to love;
- offers ideas for media tie-ins, displays, programming, book clubs, and more;
- includes annotated bibliographies, with appeal characteristics noted, and multiple indexes to ensure that locating the right graphic novel is a snap; and
- provides detailed tips for keeping current and aware of new titles and trends.
Spotlighting this expanding body of intellectual, aesthetic, and engaging literature, Goldsmith's guide will entertain as well as inform.
The Readers' Advisory Guide to Horror
Becky Siegel Spratford
American Library Association, 2021 Like the zombies, ghouls, and vampires which inhabit many of its books, the popularity of horror fiction is unstoppable. Even if you don’t happen to be a fan yourself, you won’t be “scared” to advise readers on finding their next great fright thanks to the astute guidance provided by horror expert Spratford in her updated guide. This definitive resource for library workers at any level of experience or familiarity with horror fiction - details the state of the genre right now, including its appeal factors and key authors, assisting readers in getting up to speed quickly;
- presents ten annotated lists of suggested titles, all published since 2000, each with a short introduction providing historical context;
- delves into horror movies, TV shows, podcasts, and other formats; and
- offers abundant marketing advice, programming options, and pointers on additional resources.
 Reader's Choice, 6th Edition
Sandra Silberstein, Barbara K. Dobson, and Mark A. Clarke
University of Michigan Press, 2023 In this new edition, Reader's Choice continues its legacy of teaching skills for academic success. The new edition of the classic textbook teaches readers that the most important skill is selecting the best reading strategies for solving everyday reading challenges. The exercises and readings in Reader's Choice help students become independent, efficient readers. Reader’s Choice provides 9 units that teach progressively more complex reading strategies. These units are accompanied by skills-focused activities as well as full reading passages. Units include readings and materials from respected news sites, commonly used items like transit maps, excerpts from well-known literary works such as Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” and much more. Together, these readings provide engaging, real world examples that allow students to strengthen the reading skills vital to academic and career success.
In Reader’s Choice, 6th Edition, students will: - Learn key critical reading skills for prose, charts, graphs, and data, such as analyzing context clues, using prefixes and suffixes, and more - Develop contextual reading skills through real life scenarios and practice exercises - Engage with high-interest examples from popular news sources, contemporary literature, and scientific studies - Complete interactive online quizzes and exercises to supplement and measure student learning Reader’s Choice, 6th Edition is accompanied by a companion website featuring student resources and by a set of teaching materials supporting classroom use.
CEFR Levels: B1, B2, C1, C2
 A Reader's Guide to Andrei Bely's "Petersburg"
Edited by Leonard Livak
University of Wisconsin Press, 2021 Andrei Bely's 1913 masterwork Petersburg is widely regarded as the most important Russian novel of the twentieth century. Vladimir Nabokov ranked it with James Joyce's Ulysses, Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, and Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Few artistic works created before the First World War encapsulate and articulate the sensibility, ideas, phobias, and aspirations of Russian and transnational modernism as comprehensively.
Bely expected his audience to participate in unraveling the work's many meanings, narrative strains, and patterns of details. In their essays, the contributors clarify these complexities, summarize the intellectual and artistic contexts that informed Petersburg's creation and reception, and review the interpretive possibilities contained in the novel. This volume will aid a broad audience of Anglophone readers in understanding and appreciating Petersburg.
 A Reader's Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich
Peter G. Beidler & Gay Barton
University of Missouri Press, 2006 This revised and expanded edition of Beidler and Barton’s indispensable A Reader’s Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich builds on the sellout success of the first edition. Every serious reader of Erdrich’s fiction will want access to this comprehensive new edition, which includes valuable new material. • Completely updated with information on four new novels published since the first edition: The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, The Master Butchers Singing Club, Four Souls, and The Painted Drum • Easy-to-use genealogical charts for the various families • A map and geographical details about the settings for the novels • A detailed composite dictionary of characters (even including the minor characters) • A glossary of all of the Ojibwe words, phrases, and sentences that Erdrich, an astoundingly versatile and energetic Native American author, uses in her panoply of novels
 The Readers of Novyi Mir: Coming to Terms with the Stalinist Past
Denis Kozlov
Harvard University Press, 2013 In the wake of Stalin’s death in 1953, the Soviet Union entered a period of relative openness known as the Thaw. Soviet citizens took advantage of the new opportunities to meditate on the nation’s turbulent history, from the Bolshevik Revolution, to the Terror, to World War II. Perhaps the most influential of these conversations took place in and around Novyi mir (New World), the most respected literary journal in the country. In The Readers of Novyi Mir, Denis Kozlov shows how the dialogue between literature and readers during the Thaw transformed the intellectual life and political landscape of the Soviet Union.
Powerful texts by writers like Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak, and Ehrenburg led thousands of Novyi mir’s readers to reassess their lives, entrenched beliefs, and dearly held values, and to confront the USSR’s history of political violence and social upheaval. And the readers spoke back. Victims and perpetrators alike wrote letters to the journal, reexamining their own actions and bearing witness to the tragedies of the previous decades.
Kozlov’s insightful treatment of these confessions, found in Russian archives, and his careful reading of the major writings of the period force today’s readers to rethink common assumptions about how the Soviet people interpreted their country’s violent past. The letters reveal widespread awareness of the Terror and that literary discussion of its legacy was central to public life during the late Soviet decades. By tracing the intellectual journey of Novyi mir’s readers, Kozlov illuminates how minds change, even in a closed society.
 The Reader's Repentance: Women Preachers, Women Writers, and Nineteenth-Century Social Discourse
Christine L. Krueger
University of Chicago Press, 1992 "A woman preaching is like a dog walking on its hind legs," Dr. Johnson pronounced. "It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." The prejudice embodied in this remark has persisted over time, impeding any proper assessment of the female preaching tradition and its role in shaping social and literary discourse. The Reader's Repentance recovers this tradition, and in doing so revises the history of nineteenth-century women's writing.
Christine L. Krueger persuasively argues that Evangelical Christianity, by assuming the spiritual equality of women and men and the moral superiority of middle-class women, opened a space for the linguistic empowerment of women and fostered the emergence of women orators and writers who, in complex and contradictory ways, became powerful public figures. In the light of unpublished or long out-of-print writing by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women preachers, Krueger shows how these women drew on religious language to critique forms of male domination, promote female political power, establish communities of women, and, most significantly, feminize social discourse. She traces the legacy of these preachers through the work of writers as diverse as Hannah More, Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot—women who, despite political differences, shared an evangelical strategy for placing women's concerns on the social agenda of their time.
Documenting and analyzing the tradition of women's preaching as a powerful and distinctly feminist force in the development of nineteenth-century social fiction, The Reader's Repentance reconstitutes a significant chapter in the history of women and culture. This original work will be of interest to students of women's history, literature, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century society.
 Readers: Vintage People on Photo Postcards
Tom Phillips
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2010 To celebrate the acquisition of the archive of distinguished artist Tom Phillips, the Bodleian Library asked the artist to assemble and design a series of books drawing on his themed collection of over 50,000 photographic postcards. These encompass the first half of the twentieth century, a period in which, thanks to the ever cheaper medium of photography, ordinary people could afford to own portraits of themselves. Each book in the series contains two hundred images chosen from a visually rich vein of social history. Their covers also feature thematically linked paintings, specially created for each title, from Phillips’s signature work, A Humument.
Readers, as its title suggests, shows people reading (or pretending to read) a wide variety of material, from the Bible to Film Fun, either in the photographer’s studio, in their own home, or on vacation on the beach. Each of these unique and visually stunning books give a rich glimpse of forgotten times and will be greatly valued by art and history lovers alike.
Reading 1-2 Peter and Jude: A Resource for Students
Eric F. Mason
SBL Press, 2014 An essential textbook on 1–2 Peter and Jude for readers of all levels
Scholars engage the best contemporary work on 1–2 Peter and Jude in this student-oriented book. The first four chapters in this collection—on authorship and pseudonymity, literary relationships among the three books, epistolary rhetoric, and apocalyptic elements—consider important, foundational issues related to all three epistles. These essays lay the groundwork for more focused chapters that examine theology and theory in 1 Peter as well a stylistic, theological, and thematic overlap in Jude and 2 Peter.
Features:
- A range of theological, literary, and theoretical approaches
- Definitions for specialized terminology
- Historical and cultural background information
- Explanations of methodologies
 The Reading Abilities of College Students: An Experimental Study
Alvin Eurich
University of Minnesota Press, 1931
The Reading Abilities of College Students was first published in 1931. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.How well do college students read? Can they be taught to read more intelligently by the means of intensive drills and vocabulary tests? The prevalent interest in these and similar questions has led Dr. Alvin Eurich to conduct at the University of Minnesota the carefully controlled experiment described in this volume. The special training given the experimental group is described in detail; the tests used to measure comprehension and retention of material read, rate of reading, habits of study, and vocabulary are explained and evaluated; and the relative improvement in reading skill made by students who were given special training and by those who had no such training is carefully analyzed.
 Reading across Borders: Afghans, Iranians, and Literary Nationalism
Aria Fani
University of Texas Press, 2024 2025 René Wellek Prize, Monograph, American Comparative Literature Association
The dynamic and interconnected ways Afghans and Iranians invented their modern selves through literature. Contrary to the presumption that literary nationalism in the Global South emerged through contact with Europe alone, Reading across Borders demonstrates how the cultural forms of Iran and Afghanistan as nation-states arose from their shared Persian heritage and cross-cultural exchange in the twentieth century. In this book, Aria Fani charts the individuals, institutions, and conversations that made this exchange possible, detailing the dynamic and interconnected ways Afghans and Iranians invented their modern selves through new ideas about literature. Fani illustrates how voluntary and state-funded associations of readers helped formulate and propagate "literature" as a recognizable notion, adapting and changing Persian concepts to fit this modern idea. Focusing on early twentieth-century periodicals with readers in Afghan and Iranian cities and their diaspora, Fani exposes how nationalism intensified—rather than severed—cultural contact among two Persian-speaking societies amidst the diverging and competing demands of their respective nation-states. This interconnected history was ultimately forgotten, shaping many of the cultural disputes between Iran and Afghanistan today.
 Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama
Marianne Novy
University of Michigan Press, 2005 Reading Adoption explores the ways in which novels and plays portray adoption, probing the cultural fictions that these literary representations have perpetuated. Through careful readings of works by Sophocles, Shakespeare, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Barbara Kingsolver, Edward Albee and others, Marianne Novy reveals how fiction has contributed to general perceptions of adoptive parents, adoptees, and birth parents. She observes how these works address the question of what makes a parent, as she scrutinizes basic themes that repeat throughout, such as the difference between adoptive parents and children, the mirroring between adoptees and their birth parents, and the romanticization of the theme of lost family and recovered identity. Engagingly written from Novy's dual perspectives as critic and adult adoptee, the book artfully combines the techniques of literary and feminist scholarship with memoir, and in doing so it sheds new light on familiar texts.
Marianne Novy is Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She is author or editor of numerous books, including Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture.
 Reading African American Autobiography: Twenty-First-Century Contexts and Criticism
Edited by Eric D. Lamore
University of Wisconsin Press, 2016 This timely volume embraces and interprets the increasingly broad and deep canon of life narratives by African Americans. The contributors discover and recover neglected lives, texts, and genres, enlarge the wide range of critical methods used by scholars to study these works, and expand the understanding of autobiography to encompass photography, comics, blogs, and other modes of self-expression. This book also examines at length the proliferation of African American autobiography in the twenty-first century, noting the roles of digital genres, remediated lives, celebrity lives, self-help culture, non-Western religious traditions, and the politics of adoption.
The life narratives studied range from an eighteenth-century criminal narrative, a 1918 autobiography, and the works of Richard Wright to new media, graphic novels, and a celebrity memoir from Pam Grier.
 Reading after Actium: Vergil's Georgics, Octavian, and Rome
Christopher Nappa
University of Michigan Press, 2005 Reading after Actium is a study of Vergil's Georgics, a didactic poem ostensibly about farming but in fact a brilliant exercise challenging readers to develop a broader perspective on the basic problems and the dangers of human life. Octavian is treated as one of the poet's students and given the opportunity to learn lessons in handling power, in controlling Rome's vast resources, and in preventing the bloody cycle of civil war from beginning again. Most of all the Georgics asks Octavian to consider what is involved in assuming godlike power over his fellow citizens. Reading after Actium provides an introduction to the history of scholarship surrounding the Georgics and the political questions surrounding Octavian and his career. Nappa gives a book by book analysis of the entire poem, and a conclusion that draws together the themes of the whole. Reading after Actium will appeal to students and critics of Vergil and other Augustan Literature as well as those of didactic poetry and its traditions. Students of Roman history and politics should read this as well. Christopher Nappa is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Minnesota.
Reading Akkadian Prayers and Hymns: An Introduction
Alan Lenzi
SBL Press, 2011 A thorough text for students of ancient Mesopotamian religion and the Hebrew Bible
Alan Lenzi places Akkadian prayers and hymns within both a religious studies perspective and a Mesopotamian studies perspective. Complete with vocabulary glosses, grammatical notes, literary commentary, and comparative suggestions to biblical material, this book provides a crucial tool for accessing ancient texts related to our understanding of the Hebrew Bible.
Features:
- Background essays
- Discussion of classes of Mesopotamian prayers and their comparative use in biblical studies
- Akkadian text, transliteration, translation, and commentary
- Notes on vocabulary and grammar
Alan Lenziis Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near East at University of the Pacific. He is the author of Secrecy and the Gods: Secret Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia and Biblical Israel (Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project).
 Reading America: Citizenship, Democracy, and Cold War Literature
Kristin L. Matthews
University of Massachusetts Press, 2016 During the Cold War, the editor of Time magazine declared, “A good citizen is a good reader.” As postwar euphoria faded, a wide variety of Americans turned to reading to understand their place in the changing world. Yet, what did it mean to be a good reader? And how did reading make you a good citizen?
In Reading America, Kristin L. Matthews puts into conversation a range of political, educational, popular, and touchstone literary texts to demonstrate how Americans from across the political spectrum—including “great works” proponents, New Critics, civil rights leaders, postmodern theorists, neoconservatives, and multiculturalists—celebrated particular texts and advocated particular interpretive methods as they worked to make their vision of "America" a reality. She situates the fiction of J. D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and Maxine Hong Kingston within these debates, illustrating how Cold War literature was not just an object of but also a vested participant in postwar efforts to define good reading and citizenship.
 Reading and Disorder in Antebellum America
David M. Stewart
Ohio State University Press, 2011 Historians of workingmen in the antebellum United States have long been preoccupied with labor politics and with the racism, nativism, and misogyny of their public culture. Reading and Disorder in Antebellum America expands our account of such men by asking questions about their social and bodily lives that are more discrete, yet still engaged with the economic forces that radically altered working life as the market revolution transformed a rural, agricultural nation into one that was commercial, industrial, and urban.
To advance a more capacious view of workingmen, David M. Stewart turns to reading, which is where many first encountered antebellum change as a material fact. Tapping sources from serial fiction, reform tracts, and children’s books, to diet, land use policy, and personal correspondence, Stewart contends that in helping retool a workforce of farmers and artisans to meet the disciplinary needs of capital, the period’s burgeoning new print culture industry developed rhetoric that used emotional coercion to affect conduct. This rhetoric also became the basis for recreational idioms that compensated for the pain of both coercive reading itself and the world such reading produced. In the space between the disciplinary and recreational lives of workingmen, Reading and Disorder revises how we understand them as performative subjects, which is to say, as cause and effect of changing antebellum times.
 Reading and Teaching Ancient Fiction: Jewish, Christian, and Greco-Roman Narratives
Sara R. Johnson
SBL Press, 2018 The third volume of research on ancient fiction
This volume includes essays presented in the Ancient Fiction and Early Christian and Jewish Narrative section of the Society of Biblical Literature. Contributors explore facets of ongoing research into the interplay of history, fiction, and narrative in ancient Greco-Roman, Jewish, and Christian texts. The essays examine the ways in which ancient authors in a variety of genre and cultural settings employed a range of narrative strategies to reflect on pressing contemporary issues, to shape community identity, or to provide moral and educational guidance for their readers. Not content merely to offer new insights, this volume also highlights strategies for integrating the fruits of this research into the university classroom and beyond.
Features
- Insight into the latest developments in ancient Mediterranean narrative
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- Exploration of how to use ancient texts to encourage students to examine assumptions about ancient gender and sexuality or to view familiar texts from a new perspective
- Close readings of classical authors as well as canonical and noncanonical Jewish and Christian texts
 Reading and Writing in Babylon
Dominique Charpin
Harvard University Press, 2010 Over 5,000 years ago, the history of humanity radically changed direction when writing was invented in Sumer, the southern part of present-day Iraq. For the next three millennia, kings, aristocrats, and slaves all made intensive use of cuneiform script to document everything from royal archives to family records.
In engaging style, Dominique Charpin shows how hundreds of thousands of clay tablets testify to the history of an ancient society that communicated broadly through letters to gods, insightful commentary, and sales receipts. He includes a number of passages, offered in translation, that allow readers an illuminating glimpse into the lives of Babylonians. Charpin’s insightful overview discusses the methods and institutions used to teach reading and writing, the process of apprenticeship, the role of archives and libraries, and various types of literature, including epistolary exchanges and legal and religious writing.
The only book of its kind, Reading and Writing in Babylon introduces Mesopotamia as the birthplace of civilization, culture, and literature while addressing the technical side of writing and arguing for a much wider spread of literacy than is generally assumed. Charpin combines an intimate knowledge of cuneiform with a certain breadth of vision that allows this book to transcend a small circle of scholars. Though it will engage a broad general audience, this book also fills a critical academic gap and is certain to become the standard reference on the topic.
 Reading and Writing Instruction in the Twenty-First Century: Recovering and Transforming the Pedagogy of Robert Scholes
Ellen C. Carillo
Utah State University Press, 2021 Robert Scholes passed away on December 9, 2016, leaving behind an intellectual legacy focused broadly on textuality. Scholes’s work had a significant impact on a range of fields, including literary studies, composition and rhetoric, education, media studies, and the digital humanities, among others. In Reading and Writing Instruction in the Twenty-First Century contemporary scholars explore and extend the continued relevance of Scholes’s work for those in English and writing studies.
In this volume, Scholes’s scholarship is included alongside original essays, providing a resource for those considering everything from the place of the English major in the twenty-first century to best practices for helping students navigate misinformation and disinformation. Reading and Writing Instruction in the Twenty-First Century not only keeps Scholes’s legacy alive but carries it on through a commitment, in Scholes’s (1998) own words, to “offer our students . . . the cultural equipment they are going to need when they leave us.”
Contributors:
Angela Christie, Paul T. Corrigan, Lynée Lewis Gaillet, Doug Hesse, Alice S. Horning, Emily J. Isaacs, Christopher La Casse, Robert Lestón, Kelsey McNiff, Thomas P. Miller, Jessica Rivera-Mueller, Christian Smith, Kenny Smith
 Reading and Writing Lakota Language
Albert White Hat Sr
University of Utah Press, 1999 Based on extensive research and pedagogy on the Rosebud Reservation, this elementary grammar of Lakota, one of the three languages spoken by the Sioux nation, is the first written by a native Lakota speaker. It presents the Sicangu dialect using an orthography developed by Lakota in 1982 and which is now supplanting older systems provided by linguists and missionaries. This new approach represents a powerful act of self-determination for Indian education.
Though Reading and Writing the Lakota Language is thorough in its inclusion of conjugation, syntax, and sentence, it emphasizes vocabulary and pronunciation. Author Albert White Hat Sr. presents Lakota philosophy as it applies to specific grammar lessons. Moreover, he documents the impact of the acculturation process on the language, showing how Lakota evolved as a result of non-Indian influences. The textual example offers new information and interpretation of Lakota society, even to scholars who specialize n Plains cultures. Beyond language instruction, readers will value the book for its cultural insights, humorous stories, and its entertaining tone.
 Reading and Writing the Ambiente: Queer Sexualities in Latino, Latin American, and Spanish Culture
Susana Chávez-Silverman
University of Wisconsin Press, 2000 In this dynamic collection of essays, many leading literary scholars trace gay and lesbian themes in Latin American, Hispanic, and U.S. Latino literary and cultural texts. Reading and Writing the Ambiente is consciously ambitious and far-ranging, historically as well as geographically. It includes discussions of texts from as early as the seventeenth century to writings of the late twentieth century.
Reading and Writing the Ambiente also underscores the ways in which lesbian and gay self-representation in Hispanic texts differs from representations in Anglo-American texts. The contributors demonstrate that—unlike the emphasis on the individual in Anglo- American sexual identity—Latino, Spanish, and Latin American sexual identity is produced in the surrounding culture and community, in the ambiente. As one of the first collections of its kind, Reading and Writing the Ambiente is expressive of the next wave of gay Hispanic and Latin scholarship.
 Reading Arab Women's Autobiographies: Shahrazad Tells Her Story
By Nawar Al-Hassan Golley
University of Texas Press, 2003 Authors of autobiographies are always engaged in creating a "self" to present to their readers. This process of self-creation raises a number of intriguing questions: why and how does anyone choose to present herself or himself in an autobiography? Do women and men represent themselves in different ways and, if so, why? How do differences in culture affect the writing of autobiography in various parts of the world? This book tackles these questions through a close examination of Arab women's autobiographical writings. Nawar Al-Hassan Golley applies a variety of western critical theories, including Marxism, colonial discourse, feminism, and narrative theory, to the autobiographies of Huda Shaarawi, Fadwa Tuqan, Nawal el-Saadawi, and others to demonstrate what these critical methodologies can reveal about Arab women's writing. At the same time, she also interrogates these theories against the chosen texts to see how adequate or appropriate these models are for analyzing texts from other cultures. This two-fold investigation sheds important new light on how the writers or editors of Arab women's autobiographies have written, documented, presented, and organized their texts.
 Reading Aristotle with Thomas Aquinas: His Commentaries on Aristotle's Major Works
Leo J. Elders
Catholic University of America Press, 2022 Reading Aristotle with Thomas Aquinas: His Commentaries on Aristotle’s Major Works offers an original and decisive work for the understanding of the thought of Thomas Aquinas. For decades his commentaries on the major works of Aristotle have been the subject of lively discussions. Are his commentaries faithful and reliable expositions of the Stagirite's thought or do they contain Thomas’s own philosophy and are they read through the lens of Thomas’s own Christian faith and in doing so possibly distorting Aristotle?
In order to be able to provide clarity and offer a nuanced response to this question a careful study of all the relevant texts is needed. This is precisely what the author sets out do to in this work.
Each chapter is devoted to one of the twelve commentaries Thomas wrote on major works of Aristotle including both his massive and influential commentaries on the Metaphysics, Physics and Nicomachean Ethics as well as lesser known commentaries. Elders places Thomas’s commentary in its historical context, reviews the Greek, Arabic and Latin translation and reception of Aristotle’s text as well as contemporary interpretations thereof and presents the reader with a thorough presentation and analysis of the content of the commentary, drawing attention to all the places where Thomas intervenes and makes special observations. In this way the reader can study Aristotle’s treatises with Thomas as guide.
The conclusion reached is that Thomas’s commentaries are a masterful and faithful presentation of Aristotle’s thought and of that of Thomas himself. Thomas’s Christian faith does not falsify Aristotle’s text, but gives occasionally an outlook at what lies behind philosophical thought.
 Reading as Collective Action: Text as Tactics
Nicholas Hengen Fox
University of Iowa Press, 2017 Literature is powerful. It offers respite. It provides access to beauty and horror, to new places, new people, and new ideas. It can, as the phrase goes, change your life. Good things, all of them. But also somewhat limited goods: they’re all pretty passive, pretty private—you might even say self-centered.
Reading as Collective Action shifts our focus outward, to another of literature’s powers: the power to reshape our world in very public, very active ways. In this book, you will encounter readers who criticized the Bush administration’s war on terror by republishing poems by writers ranging from Shakespeare to Amiri Baraka everywhere from lampposts to the New York Times. You will read about people in Michigan and Tennessee, who leveraged a community reading program on John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath to organize support for those in need during the Great Recession and to engage with their neighbors about immigration. You will meet a pair of students who took to public transit to talk with strangers about working-class literature and a trio who created a literary website that reclaimed the working-class history of the Pacific Northwest.
This book challenges dominant academic modes of reading. For adherents of the “civic turn,” it suggests how we can create more politically effective forms of service learning and community engagement grounded in a commitment to tactical, grassroots actions. Whether you’re a social worker or a student, a zine-maker, a librarian, a professor, or just a passionate reader with a desire to better your community, this book shows that when we read texts as tactics, “that book changed my life” can become “that book changed our lives.”
 Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans
Timothy Aubry
University of Iowa Press, 2011 @font-face { font-family: "Myriad Pro";}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }Why do Americans read contemporary fiction? This question seems simple, but is it? Do Americans read for the purpose of aesthetic appreciation? To satisfy their own insatiable intellectual curiosities? While other forms of media have come to monopolize consumers’ leisure time, in the past two decades book clubs have proliferated, Amazon has sponsored thriving online discussions, Oprah Winfrey has inspired millions of viewers to read both contemporary works and classics, and novels have retained their devoted following within middlebrow communities.
In Reading as Therapy, Timothy Aubry argues that contemporary fiction serves primarily as a therapeutic tool for lonely, dissatisfied middle-class American readers, one that validates their own private dysfunctions while supporting elusive communities of strangers unified by shared feelings. Aubry persuasively makes the case that contemporary literature’s persistent appeal depends upon its capacity to perform a therapeutic function. Reading as Therapy traces the growth and proliferation of psychological concepts focused on the subjective interior within mainstream, middle-class society and the impact this has had on contemporary fiction. The prevailing tendency among academic critics has been to decry the personal emphasis of contemporary fiction as complicit with the rise of a narcissistic culture, the ascendency of liberal individualism, and the breakdown of public life. Reading as Therapy, by contrast, underscores the varied ideological effects that therapeutic culture can foster. To uncover the many unpredictable ways in which contemporary literature answers the psychological needs of its readers, Aubry considers several different venues of reader-response—including Oprah’s Book Club and Amazon customer reviews—the promotional strategies of publishing houses, and a variety of contemporary texts, ranging from Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner to Anita Shreve’s The Pilot’s Wife to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. He concludes that, in the face of an atomistic social landscape, contemporary fiction gives readers a therapeutic vocabulary that both reinforces the private sphere and creates surprising forms of sympathy and solidarity among strangers.
 Reading at the Limits of Poetic Form: Dematerialization in Adorno, Blanchot, and Celan
Jacob McGuinn
Northwestern University Press, 2024 Pushing the boundaries of critical reading and the role of objects in literature
How does literary objecthood contend with the challenge of writing objects that emerge at an extreme limit of material presence? Jacob McGuinn delves into the ways literature writes this indeterminate presence in the context of pre- and post-’68 Paris, a vital moment in the history of criticism. The works of poet Paul Celan, philosopher Theodor Adorno, and writer Maurice Blanchot highlight how the complexities of reading such a dematerialized object are part of the indeterminacy of material itself. Indeterminate objects—glass, snow, walls, screens—are subjects Celan describes as existing in “meridian” space, while for Adorno and Blanchot, criticism not only responds to this indeterminacy but also takes it as its condition. Reading at the Limits of Poetic Form: Dematerialization in Adorno, Blanchot, and Celan shows how these readings simultaneously limit the object of criticism and outline alternative ways of thinking that lie between the models of critical formalism and historicism, ultimately revealing the possible materiality of literature in unrealized history, incomplete politics, and nondetermining thinking.
 Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives
Sidonie Smith
University of Minnesota Press, 2002 Autobiographical writing is redefining the meaning of narrative, as the recent explosion of memoirs by writers such as Frank McCourt, Mary Karr, Dave Eggers, and Kathryn Harrison suggests. But what’s involved in bringing these narratives into the classroom—in creative writing, cultural studies, women’s and ethnic studies, and social science and literature courses? How may instructors engage the philosophical, historical, social, and theoretical contexts of the emerging field of autobiography studies?Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, two authorities in life narrative studies distill their diverse forays into life writing in a concise yet far-reaching overview of key terms, issues, histories, and texts in autobiography studies. Reading Autobiography is a step-by-step introduction to the differences of self-narrative from fiction and biography; the components of autobiographical acts; such core concepts as memory, experience, identity, agency, and the body; the textual and critical history of the field; and prospects for future research. Organized as a user-friendly handbook, it includes a glossary of key words, suggestions for teaching, and extensive primary and secondary bibliographies. Sidonie Smith is professor of English and women’s studies at the University of Michigan. Julia Watson is associate professor of comparative studies at Ohio State University.
 Reading Autobiography Now: An Updated Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Third Edition
Sidonie Smith
University of Minnesota Press, 2024 A user-friendly guide to reading, writing, and theorizing autobiographical texts and practices for students, scholars, and practitioners of life narrative
The boom in autobiographical narratives continues apace. It now encompasses a global spectrum of texts and practices in such media as graphic memoir, auto-photography, performance and plastic arts, film and video, and online platforms. Reading Autobiography Now offers both a critical engagement with life narrative in historical perspective and a theoretical framework for interpreting texts and practices in this wide-ranging field. Hailed upon its initial publication as “the Whole Earth Catalog of autobiography studies,” this essential book has been updated, reorganized, and expanded in scope to serve as an accessible and contemporary guide for scholars, students, and practitioners. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson explore definitions of life narrative, probe issues of subjectivity, and outline salient features of autobiographical acts and practices. In this updated edition, they address emergent topics such as autotheory, autofiction, and autoethnography; expand the discussions of identity, relationality, and agency; and introduce new material on autobiographical archives and the profusion of “I”s in contemporary works. Smith and Watson also provide a helpful toolkit of strategies for reading life narrative and an extensive glossary of mini-essays analyzing key theoretical concepts and dozens of autobiographical genres. An indispensable exploration of this expansive, transnational, multimedia field, Reading Autobiography Now meticulously unpacks the heterogeneous modes of life narratives through which people tell their stories, from traditional memoirs and trauma narratives to collaborative life narrative and autobiographical comics.
Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to French-language Comic Strip
Ann Miller
Intellect Books, 2007
Bande dessinée, or French comic strip, has always provoked controversy—labeled a danger to literacy and moral standards by its detractors, this polarizing art form has at the same time been deemed worthy of prestigious national centers in France and Belgium. Reading Bande Dessinée, the first English-language overview and critical study of this intriguing medium, traces the history and examines the cultural implications of French comics.
Ann Miller’s groundbreaking book not only parses bande dessinée as visual narrative art, but it shows readers how to study it, as she places these comic strips in the context of debates surrounding the form’s legitimization, approaches it from a cultural studies perspective, and examines bande dessinée in its relationship to subjectivity in the body. Miller here illuminates such disparate concepts as Astérix and the mythologizing of Frenchness, historical memory and the Algerian war, and characterizations of the new managerial bourgeoisie in the context of Francophone comic strips. Reading Bande Dessinée will help lay a scholarly foundation for the growing interest in this captivating art form in the Anglophone world.
“[Miller’s] analysis ranges from psychoanalytic to Marxist interpretations and is a terrific introduction to this neglected aspect of the comic world.”—Roger Sabin, Observer
“The characteristics of Ann Miller’s writing for me abound in this latest work; concise prose, beautifully crafted sentences, complex analysis illustrated with crystal clear exemplification. This is a work for a wide readership. It is a work for enriching subject knowledge for teachers and students of French and/or the visual arts at advanced levels.”—Ann Swarbrick, Language Learning Journal
“The work provides both a key analysis for scholars of the bande dessinée, as well as a manual for a modern application of critical theory.”—Dr. Laurence Grove, University of Glasgow
“This exceptional work of synthesis by Ann Miller must be applauded. She succeeds in providing a detailed and complete panorama of bande dessinée a cultural phenomenon, an achievement which is all the more remarkable given that the author makes successive use of multiple scholarly approaches, moving from the cultural history of the production and reception of bande dessinée to the theoretical reflections on the medium, the sociological analysis and the problematic of the autobiographical self in graphic literature.”—Harry Morgan
 Reading Bangkok
Ross King
National University of Singapore Press, 2011 Reading Bangkok presents stories and meanings derived from the built fabric and spaces of Thailand's capital city. The narrative shifts from King Taksin's mostly forgotten but wondrous Thonburi to the tourist spectacle of Rattanakosin, Dusit and Ratchadamnoen (King Rama V's superficial emulation of an admired, imperialist Europe), Sukhumvit "Road" (consumer land), and the slums that are an integral part of the modern city.
The author structures the book around external intrusions and local resistance. Geographically, this process is seen in movement from centre to periphery (Thonburi, Rattanakosin, Ratchadamnoen, Sukhumvit, Ratchadapisek, Khlong Toei, the universities). Chronologically, the city underwent various forms of colonization: incorporation of the periphery, which in turn colonized Bangkok; the economic colonization of the 19th and 20th centuries; colonization by consumption brought on in large part by globalized tourism; colonization by the "better" ideas of others (typically from the West); and finally colonization by "better" ways of thinking - notably the intrusions of the universities and of popular democracy.
This exceptionally innovative study draws on urban planning and development, history, anthropology, and political economy, and a rich body of empirical data to provide insights into the maze of power relations, inequalities and global influences that is normally hidden from view. Reading Bangkok is that rare thing, a study that genuinely changes the way its subject is seen and understood.
Reading Berlin 1900
Peter Fritzsche
Harvard University Press, 1996 The great cities at the turn of the century were mediated by words--newspapers, advertisements, signs, and schedules--by which the inhabitants lived, dreamed, and imagined their surroundings. In this original study of the classic text of urban modernism--the newspaper page--Peter Fritzsche analyzes how reading and writing dramatized Imperial Berlin and anticipated the modernist sensibility that celebrated discontinuity, instability, and transience. It is a sharp-edged story with cameo appearances by Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, and Alfred Döblin. This sumptuous history of a metropolis and its social and literary texts provides a rich evocation of a particularly exuberant and fleeting moment in history.
 Reading between Designs: Visual Imagery and the Generation of Meaning in The Avengers, The Prisoner, and Doctor Who
By Piers D. Britton and Simon J. Barker
University of Texas Press, 2003 From the alien worlds of Star Trek to the realistic operating room of ER, the design of sets and costumes contributes not only to the look and mood of television shows, but even more importantly to the creation of memorable characters. Yet, until now, this crucial aspect of television creativity has received little critical attention, despite the ongoing interest in production design within the closely allied discipline of film studies. In this book, Piers Britton and Simon Barker offer a first analytical study of scenic and costume design for television drama series. They focus on three enduringly popular series of the 1960s—The Avengers, The Prisoner, and Doctor Who—and discuss such topics as the sartorial image of Steed in The Avengers, the juxtaposition of picturesque and fascistic architecture in The Prisoner, and the evolution of the high-tech interior of Doctor Who's TARDIS. Interviews with the series' original designers and reproductions of their original drawings complement the authors' analysis, which sheds new light on a variety of issues, from the discourse of fashion to that of the heritage industry, notions of "Pop" and retro, and the cultural preoccupation with realism and virtual reality.
 Reading Biblical Texts Together: Pursuing Minoritized Biblical Criticism
Tat-Siong Benny Liew
SBL Press, 2022 A solid and suggestive foundation for the future of ethnic-racial minority biblical criticism
This volume, edited by Tat-siong Benny Liew and Fernando F. Segovia, expands the work begun in They Were All Together in One Place? Toward Minority Biblical Criticism (2009) by focusing on specific texts for scholarly engagement and exchange. Essays by scholars of racial/ethnic minoritized criticism of the Bible highlight the various factors and dynamics at play in the formation of power relations within and through four biblical texts: two from the Hebrew Bible (Genesis 21 and 1 Kings 12) and two from the New Testament (John 4 and Revelation 18). Contributors include Ahida Calderón Pilarski, Ronald Charles, Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder, Lynne St. Clair Darden, Steed Vernyl Davidson, Mary F. Foskett, Jione Havea, Tat-siong Benny Liew, Roberto Mata, Henry W. Morisada Rietz, Raj Nadella, Miranda N. Pillay, David Arthur Sánchez, Timothy J. Sandoval, Fernando F. Segovia, Mitzi J. Smith, Angeline M. G. Song, Linzie M. Treadway, Nasili Vaka’uta, Demetrius K. Williams, and Gale A. Yee. Each essay expands our understandings of minoritization from a global perspective.
Reading Billy Budd
Hershel Parker
Northwestern University Press, 1990 In this study of Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor, renowned Melville scholar Hershel Parker provides the fullest introduction to and analysis of this work to date. It is the first complete reading of Billy Budd to draw on the definitive but neglected Hayford-Sealts Genetic Text. For the first time, it places Billy Budd in the context of Melville's writings and projects of the last decade of his life; and it is the first to present the work as a product of the post-Gilded Age and fin-de-siecle period rather than of the mid-century high romanticism of Moby-Dick.
 Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott
Carol Mavor
Duke University Press, 2007 An intricate text filled to the brim with connotations of desire, home, and childhood—nests, food, beds, birds, fairies, bits of string, ribbon, goodnight kisses, appetites sated and denied— Reading Boyishly is a story of mothers and sons, loss and longing, writing and photography. In this homage to four boyish men and one boy—J. M. Barrie, Roland Barthes, Marcel Proust, D. W. Winnicott, and the young photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue—Carol Mavor embraces what some have anxiously labeled an over-attachment to the mother. Here, the maternal is a cord (unsevered) to the night-light of boyish reading. To “read boyishly” is to covet the mother’s body as a home both lost and never lost, to desire her as only a son can, as only a body that longs for, but will never become Mother, can. Nostalgia (from the Greek nostos = return to native land, and algos = suffering or grief) is at the heart of the labor of boyish reading, which suffers in its love affair with the mother. The writers and the photographer that Mavor lovingly considers are boyish readers par excellence: Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up; Barthes, the “professor of desire” who lived with or near his mother until her death; Proust, the modernist master of nostalgia; Winnicott, therapist to “good enough” mothers; and Lartigue, the child photographer whose images invoke ghostlike memories of a past that is at once comforting and painful. Drawing attention to the interplay between writing and vision, Reading Boyishly is stuffed full with more than 200 images. At once delicate and powerful, the book is a meditation on the threads that unite mothers and sons and on the writers and artists who create from those threads art that captures an irretrievable past.
 Reading Capitalist Realism
Alison Shonkwiler and Leigh Claire LaBerge
University of Iowa Press, 2014 As the world has been reshaped since the 1970s by economic globalization, neoliberalism, and financialization, writers and artists have addressed the problem of representing the economy with a new sense of political urgency. Anxieties over who controls capitalism have thus been translated into demands upon literature, art, and mass media to develop strategies of representation that can account for capitalism’s power.
Reading Capitalist Realism presents some of the latest and most sophisticated approaches to the question of the relation between capitalism and narrative form, partly by questioning how the “realism” of austerity, privatization, and wealth protection relate to the realism of narrative and cultural production. Even as critics have sought to locate a new aesthetic mode that might consider and move beyond theorizations of the postmodern, this volume contends that narrative realism demands renewed scrutiny for its ability to represent capitalism’s latest scenes of enclosure and indebtedness.
Ranging across fiction, nonfiction, television, and film, the essays collected here explore to what extent realism is equipped to comprehend and historicize our contemporary economic moment and what might be the influence or complicity of the literary in shaping the global politics of lowered expectations. Including essays on writers such as Mohsin Hamid, Lorrie Moore, Jess Walter, J. M. Coetzee, James Kelman, Ali Smith, Russell Banks, William Vollmann, and William Gibson, as well as examinations of Hollywood film productions and The Wire television series, Reading Capitalist Realism calls attention to a resurgence of realisms across narrative genres and questions realism’s ability to interrogate the crisis-driven logic of political and economic “common sense.”
 Reading Chican@ Like a Queer: The De-Mastery of Desire
By Sandra K. Soto
University of Texas Press, 2010 A race-based oppositional paradigm has informed Chicano studies since its emergence. In this work, Sandra K. Soto replaces that paradigm with a less didactic, more flexible framework geared for a queer analysis of the discursive relationship between racialization and sexuality. Through rereadings of a diverse range of widely discussed writers—from Américo Paredes to Cherríe Moraga—Soto demonstrates that representations of racialization actually depend on the sexual and that a racialized sexuality is a heretofore unrecognized organizing principle of Chican@ literature, even in the most unlikely texts. Soto gives us a broader and deeper engagement with Chican@ representations of racialization, desire, and both inter- and intracultural social relations. While several scholars have begun to take sexuality seriously by invoking the rich terrain of contemporary Chicana feminist literature for its portrayal of culturally specific and historically laden gender and sexual frameworks, as well as for its imaginative transgressions against them, this is the first study to theorize racialized sexuality as pervasive to and enabling of the canon of Chican@ literature. Exemplifying the broad usefulness of queer theory by extending its critical tools and anti-heteronormative insights to racialization, Soto stages a crucial intervention amid a certain loss of optimism that circulates both as a fear that queer theory was a fad whose time has passed, and that queer theory is incapable of offering an incisive, politically grounded analysis in and of the current historical moment.
 Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie: The Making of Chinese American Rhetoric
LuMing Mao
Utah State University Press, 2006 ecent scholarship tends to explain such influences as contributing to language hybridity---an advance over the traditional "deficit model." But Mao suggests that the "hybridity" approach is perhaps too arid or sanitized, missing rich nuances of mutual exchange, resistance, or even subversion. Through his concept of "togetherness in difference, Mao suggests that speakers of hybrid discourse may not be attempting the standard (and failing), but instead may be deliberately importing cultural material to create a distance between themselves and the standard. This practice, over time, becomes a process that transforms English, enriching and enlarging it through the infusion of non-Western discourse features, subverting power structures, and even providing unique humorous touches. Of interest to scholars in composition, cultural studies, and linguistics as well, Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie leads in an important new direction for both our understanding and our teaching of English.
 Reading Clocks, Alla Turca: Time and Society in the Late Ottoman Empire
Avner Wishnitzer
University of Chicago Press, 2015 Up until the end of the eighteenth century, the way Ottomans used their clocks conformed to the inner logic of their own temporal culture. However, this began to change rather dramatically during the nineteenth century, as the Ottoman Empire was increasingly assimilated into the European-dominated global economy and the project of modern state building began to gather momentum. In Reading Clocks, Alla Turca, Avner Wishnitzer unravels the complexity of Ottoman temporal culture and for the first time tells the story of its transformation. He explains that in their attempt to attain better surveillance capabilities and higher levels of regularity and efficiency, various organs of the reforming Ottoman state developed elaborate temporal constructs in which clocks played an increasingly important role. As the reform movement spread beyond the government apparatus, emerging groups of officers, bureaucrats, and urban professionals incorporated novel time-related ideas, values, and behaviors into their self-consciously “modern” outlook and lifestyle. Acculturated in the highly regimented environment of schools and barracks, they came to identify efficiency and temporal regularity with progress and the former temporal patterns with the old political order.
Drawing on a wealth of archival and literary sources, Wishnitzer’s original and highly important work presents the shifting culture of time as an arena in which Ottoman social groups competed for legitimacy and a medium through which the very concept of modernity was defined. Reading Clocks, Alla Turca breaks new ground in the study of the Middle East and presents us with a new understanding of the relationship between time and modernity.
 Reading Conrad
Edited by John G. Peters and Jakob Lothe
Ohio State University Press, 2017 For half a century, J. Hillis Miller has been a premier figure in English and comparative literature, influencing and leading the direction of literary studies. What is less well-known is that he has been equally influential in Conrad studies with his work on nihilism, language, and narrative in Joseph Conrad’s fiction. Returning to Conrad at different stages of his long career—reading and rereading him in light of new critical trends—Miller continually discovered new aspects of the influential author’s fiction. This volume, edited by John G. Peters and Jakob Lothe, charts Miller’s shifting insights into Joseph Conrad’s fiction and also highlights the potential of Conrad studies to illuminate core questions in studies of narrative theory, aesthetics, and history.
Reading Conrad by J. Hillis Miller demonstrates a surprising cohesiveness across Miller’s career as well as the richness of Conrad’s fiction, which affords varied opportunities for critical approaches as different as phenomenology, new criticism, deconstruction, narrative theory, and narrative ethics. Miller’s analyses emphasize literature’s rhetorical and performative power, ultimately suggesting that while narrative fiction is an effect of a series of complex phenomena in society and in the human psyche, as literary language it can also refer to the external world indirectly and contribute to the formation of history from within.
 Reading Country Music: Steel Guitars, Opry Stars, and Honky Tonk Bars
Cecelia Tichi, ed.
Duke University Press, 1998 With its steel guitars, Opry stars, and honky-tonk bars, country music is an American original. The most popular music in America today, it’s also big business. Amazing, then, that country music has been so little studied by critics, given its predominance in American culture. Reading Country Music acknowledges the significance of country music as part of an authentic American heritage and turns a loving, critical eye toward understanding the sweep of this peculiarly American phenomenon. Bringing together a wide range of scholars and critics from literature, communications, history, sociology, art, and music, this anthology looks at everything from the inner workings of the country music industry to the iconography of certain stars to the development of distinctive styles within the country music genre. Essays include a look at the shift from "hard-core" to "soft-shell" country music in recent years; Johnny Cash as lesbian icon; gender, class, and region in Dolly Parton’s star image; and bluegrass’s gothic tradition. Originally published as a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, this expanded book edition includes new articles on the spirituality of Willie Nelson, the legacy and tradition of stringed music, and the revival of Stephen Foster’s blackface musical, among others. Contributors. Mary A. Bufwack, Don Cusic, Curtis W. Ellison, Mark Fenster, Vivien Green Fryd, Teresa Goddu, T. Walter Herbert, Christine Kreyling, Michael Kurek, Amy Schrager Lang, Charmaine Lanham, Bill Malone, Christopher Metress, Jocelyn Neal, Teresa Ortega, Richard A. Peterson, Ronnie Pugh, John W. Rumble, David Sanjek, Cecelia Tichi, Pamela Wilson, Charles K. Wolfe
 The Reading Crisis: Why Poor Children Fall Behind
Jeanne S. Chall, Vicki A. Jacobs, and Luke E. Baldwin
Harvard University Press, 1990 How severe is the literacy gap in our schools? Why does the nine-year-old child from a culturally disadvantaged background so often fall victim to the fourth-grade slump? Although the cognitive abilities of these “children at risk” may be consistent with the norm, their literacy development lags far behind that of other children. In The Reading Crisis, the renowned reading specialist Jeanne Chall and her colleagues examine the causes of this disparity and suggest some remedies.
Using Chall’s widely applied model of reading development, the authors examine the strengths and weaknesses in the reading, writing, and language development of children from low-income families in an attempt to identify the onset of their difficulties. They show how, in the transition from learning the medium to understanding the message, the demands on children’s reading skills become significantly more complex. The crucial point is fourth grade, when students confront texts containing unfamiliar words and ideas that are beyond the range of their own experience. According to Chall’s findings, the lack of specific literacy skills—not cognitive factors—explains the deceleration in the reading and writing development of low-income children. The authors outline an active role for the schools in remedying weaknesses in literacy development, and give suggestions for the home and the community. Their recommendations address both practical issues in instruction and the teacher–student dynamic that fosters literacy development.
Reading Cusanus: Metaphor and Dialectic in a Conjectural Universe
Clyde Lee Miller
Catholic University of America Press, 2019 This book presents careful readings of six of the most important theoretical works of Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1463). Though Nicholas' writings have long been studied as either scholastic Aristotelian or proto-Kantian, Clyde Lee Miller locates Cusanus squarely in the Christian Neoplatonic tradition. He demonstrates how Nicholas worked out his own original synthesis of that tradition by fashioning a conjectural view of main categories of Christian thought: God, the universe, Jesus Christ, and human beings. Each of the readings reveals how Nicholas' project of "learned ignorance" is played out in striking metaphors for God and the relation of God to creation.
 Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950
Marwa Elshakry
University of Chicago Press, 2013 In Reading Darwin in Arabic, Marwa Elshakry questions current ideas about Islam, science, and secularism by exploring the ways in which Darwin was read in Arabic from the late 1860s to the mid-twentieth century. Borrowing from translation and reading studies and weaving together the history of science with intellectual history, she explores Darwin’s global appeal from the perspective of several generations of Arabic readers and shows how Darwin’s writings helped alter the social and epistemological landscape of the Arab learned classes. Providing a close textual, political, and institutional analysis of the tremendous interest in Darwin’s ideas and other works on evolution, Elshakry shows how, in an age of massive regional and international political upheaval, these readings were suffused with the anxieties of empire and civilizational decline. The politics of evolution infiltrated Arabic discussions of pedagogy, progress, and the very sense of history. They also led to a literary and conceptual transformation of notions of science and religion themselves. Darwin thus became a vehicle for discussing scriptural exegesis, the conditions of belief, and cosmological views more broadly. The book also acquaints readers with Muslim and Christian intellectuals, bureaucrats, and theologians, and concludes by exploring Darwin’s waning influence on public and intellectual life in the Arab world after World War I. Reading Darwin in Arabic is an engaging and powerfully argued reconceptualization of the intellectual and political history of the Middle East.
Reading De Man Reading
Lindsey Waters and Wlad Godzich, Editors
University of Minnesota Press, 1989 Reading De Man Reading was first published in 1989. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Paul de Man, from the outset of his career, concerned himself with the act of reading and with discovering what a rigorous mode of reading can produce. The contributors to this volume—conceived not long before de Man's death in 1983—address his theory and practice of reading: the nature of those readings and what they signify for reading in general, not just for literary texts. De Man explored the act of reading because in it he could bring together—in order to cancel—the subjects known as reader and writer, the referent known as reality, and the medium known as language. In the act of reading de Man, the authors of this book ask where his work leaves us, what changes he made in the world of criticism and writing in general, and what we do differently because of him. The contributors: Geoffrey Hartman, Jacques Derrida, Deborah Esch, Neil Hertz, Carol Jacobs, Kevin Newmark, Peggy Kamuf, J. Hillis Miller, Werner Hamacher, Hans Robert Jauss, Geoffrey Bennington, Bill Readings, Timothy Bahti, and Rodolphe Gasché. Lindsay Waters is General Editor at Harvard University Press. Wlad Godzich is professor of comparative literature at the Université de Montréal and co-editor of the Theory and History of Literature series.
 Reading Death in Ancient Rome
Mario Erasmo
Ohio State University Press, 2008 In Reading Death in Ancient Rome, Mario Erasmo considers both actual funerary rituals and their literary depictions in epic, elegy, epitaphs, drama, and prose works as a form of participatory theater in which the performers and the depicters of rituals engage in strategies to involve the viewer/reader in the ritual process, specifically by invoking and playing on their cultural associations at a number of levels simultaneously. He focuses on the associative reading process—the extent to which literary texts allude to funeral and burial ritual, the narrative role played by the allusion to recreate a fictive version of the ritual, and how the allusion engages readers’ knowledge of the ritual or previous literary intertexts. Such a strategy can advance a range of authorial agendas by inviting readers to read and reread assumptions about both the surrounding Roman culture and earlier literature invoked through intertextual referencing. By (re)defining their relation to the dead, readers assume various roles in an ongoing communion with the departed. Reading Death in Ancient Rome makes an important and innovative contribution to semiotic theory as applied to classical texts and to the emerging field of mortality studies. It should thus appeal to classicists as well as to advanced undergraduate and graduate students in art history and archeology.
 Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval Aeneid
Marilynn Desmond
University of Minnesota Press, 1994 Describes the variations in the figure of Dido as she emerges from ancient literary texts. If we view the Aeneid—the poem of empire, conquest, and male hierarchy-as the West's quintessential canonical text and Latin primer, then the history of Virgil readership should tell us much about the concept of education in the West. In this book, Marilynn Desmond reveals how a constructed and mediated tradition of reading Virgil has conditioned various interpretations among readers responding to medieval cultural and literary texts. In particular, she shows how the story of Dido has been marginalized within canonical readings of the Aeneid. Reaching back to the Middle Ages and vernacular poetic readings of Dido, Desmond recovers an alternative Virgil from historical tradition and provides another paradigm for reading the Aeneid. Desmond follows the figure of Dido as she emerges from ancient historical and literary texts (from Timaeus and Justin to Virgil and Ovid) and circulates in medieval textual cultures. Her study ranges from the pedagogical discourses of Latin textual traditions (including Servius, Augustine, Bernard Silvestris, and John of Salisbury) to the French and English vernacular cultures inscribed in the Roman d'Eneas, the Histoire ancienne jusqu'à César, and the work of Dante, Chaucer, Gavin Douglas, Caxton, and Christine de Pizan. The positions of all these readers point to the cultural specificity and historical contingency of all traditions of reading; thus, this book demonstrates how medieval traditions of reading Dido offer the modern reader a series of countertraditions that support feminist, antihomophobic, and postcolonial interpretive gestures.
 Reading Dostoevsky
Victor Terras
University of Wisconsin Press, 1998 “A substantial contribution both to Dostoevsky scholarship and to scholarship on the novel. . . . The first book in quite a while to address itself to all of Dostoevsky’s opus, certainly a bold move that only someone of Terras’s stature could pull off.”—Gary Rosenshield, University of Madison–Wisconsin
Admirers have praised Fedor Dostoevsky as the Russian Shakespeare, while his critics have slighted his novels as merely cheap amusements. In this stimulating critical introduction to Dostoevsky’s fiction, literary scholar Victor Terras asks readers to draw their own conclusions about the nineteenth-century Russian writer. Discussing psychological, political, mythical, and philosophical approaches, Terras deftly guides readers through the range of diverse and even contradictory interpretations of Dostoevsky's rich novels.
Moving through the novelist's career, Terras presents a general analysis of the novel at issue, each chapter focusing on a particular aspect of Dostoevsky's art. He probes the form and style of Crime and Punishment, and explores the ambiguity of The Brothers Karamazov. Terras emphasizes the "markedness," of Dostoevsky's novels, their wealth of literary devices such as irony, literary allusions, scenic effects, puns, and witticisms.
Terras conveys the vital contradictions and ambiguities of the novels. In this informative, engaging literary study, Terras brings Dostoevsky and his art to life.
 Reading Du Fu: Nine Views
Edited by Xiaofei Tian
Hong Kong University Press, 2020 This is the first collection of essays in English, contributed by well-known experts of Chinese literature as well as scholars of a younger generation, dedicated to the poetry of Du Fu, commonly regarded as the greatest Chinese poet. These essays are engaged in historically nuanced close reading of Du Fu’s poems, both canonical and less known, from new angles and in various contexts, and discuss a series of critical issues, including the local and the imperial; the body politic and the individual body; poetry and geography; perspectives on the complicated relation of religion and literature; materiality and contemporary reception of Du Fu; poetry and visual art; and tradition and modernity. Many of the poems discussed in this book were written in the backwater town of Kuizhou, far from Du Fu’s earlier residence in the capital city Chang’an, at a time when the Tang dynasty was going through devastating social and political disturbances. The authors contend that Du Fu’s isolation from the elite literary establishments allowed him to become a pioneer who introduced a new order to the Chinese poetic discourse. However, his attention to details in everyday reality, his preoccupation with domestic life and the larger issues embroiled in it, his humor, and his ability to surprise tend to be obscured by the clichéd image of the “poet sage” and “poet historian”—an image this collection of essays successfully complicates.
 Reading Duncan Reading: Robert Duncan and the Poetics of Derivation
Stephen Collis
University of Iowa Press, 2012 In Reading Duncan Reading, thirteen scholars and poets examine, first, what and how the American poet Robert Duncan read and, perforce, what and how he wrote. Harold Bloom wrote of the searing anxiety of influence writers experience as they grapple with the burden of being original, but for Duncan this was another matter altogether. Indeed, according to Stephen Collis, “No other poet has so openly expressed his admiration for and gratitude toward his predecessors.” Part one emphasizes Duncan’s acts of reading, tracing a variety of his derivations—including Sarah Ehlers’s demonstration of how Milton shaped Duncan’s early poetic aspirations, Siobhán Scarry’s unveiling of the many sources (including translation and correspondence) drawn into a single Duncan poem, and Clément Oudart’s exploration of Duncan’s use of “foreign words” to fashion “a language to which no one is native.” In part two, the volume turns to examinations of poets who can be seen to in some way derive from Duncan—and so in turn reveals another angle of Duncan’s derivative poetics. J. P. Craig traces Nathaniel MacKey’s use of Duncan’s “would-be shaman,” Catherine Martin sees Duncan’s influence in Susan Howe’s “development of a poetics where the twin concepts of trespass and ‘permission’ hold comparable sway,” and Ross Hair explores poet Ronald Johnson’s “reading to steal.” These and other essays collected here trace paths of poetic affiliation and affinity and hold them up as provocative possibilities in Duncan’s own inexhaustible work.
 Reading Embodied Citizenship: Disability, Narrative, and the Body Politic
Russell, Emily
Rutgers University Press, 2011 Liberal individualism, a foundational concept of American politics, assumes an essentially homogeneous population of independent citizens. When confronted with physical disability and the contradiction of seemingly unruly bodies, however, the public searches for a story that can make sense of the difference. The narrative that ensues makes "abnormality" an important part of the dialogue about what a genuine citizen is, though its role is concealed as an exception to the rule of individuality rather than a defining difference. Reading Embodied Citizenship brings disability to the forefront, illuminating its role in constituting what counts as U.S. citizenship. Drawing from major figures in American literature, including Mark Twain, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, and David Foster Wallace, as well as introducing texts from the emerging canon of disability studies, Emily Russell demonstrates the place of disability at the core of American ideals. The narratives prompted by the encounter between physical difference and the body politic require a new understanding of embodiment as a necessary conjunction of physical, textual, and social bodies. Russell examines literature to explore and unsettle long-held assumptions about American citizenship.
 Reading Emily Dickinson's Letters: Critical Essays
Jane Donahue Eberwein
University of Massachusetts Press, 2009 Emily Dickinson, who regarded a letter as "a joy of Earth," was herself a gifted epistolary artist—cryptic and allusive in style, dazzling in verbal effects, and sensitively attuned to the recipients of her many letters. In this volume, distinguished literary scholars focus intensively on Dickinson's letter-writing and what her letters reveal about her poetics, her personal associations, and her self-awareness as a writer.
Although Dickinson's letters have provided invaluable perspective for biographers and lovers of poetry since Mabel Loomis Todd published the first selection in 1894, today's scholarly climate opens potential for fresh insights drawn from new theoretical approaches, informed cultural contextualizations, and rigorous examination of manuscript evidence. Essays in this collection explore ways that Emily Dickinson adapted nineteenth-century epistolary conventions of women's culture, as well as how she directed her writing to particular readers, providing subtly tactful guidance to ways of approaching her poetics.
Close examination of her letters reveals the conscious artistry of Dickinson's writing, from her auditory effects to her experiments with form and tone. Her well-known correspondences with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Susan Dickinson, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Otis Phillips Lord are examined here, but so too are previously neglected family communications with her aunt Kate Sweetser and cousin Eugenia Montague. Contributors find in these various letters evidence of Dickinson's enthusiastic participation in a sort of epistolary book club involving multiple friends, as well as her loving attentiveness to individuals in times of both suffering and joy. These inquiries highlight her thoughts on love, marriage, gender roles, art, and death, while unraveling mysteries ranging from legal discourse to Etruscan smiles.
In addition to a foreword by Marietta Messmer, the volume includes essays by Paul Crumbley, Karen Dandurand, Jane Donahue Eberwein, Judith Farr, James Guthrie, Ellen Louise Hart, Eleanor Heginbotham, Cindy MacKenzie, Martha Nell Smith, and Stephanie Tingley.
Reading Etty Hillesum in Context: Writings, Life, and Influences of a Visionary Author
Edited by Klaas Smelik, Gerrit van Oord, and Jurjen Wiersma
Amsterdam University Press, 2018 The diaries and letters of Etty Hillesum (1914—1943) have a special place among the Jewish-Dutch testimonies of the Shoah, so much so that Etty Hillesum studies has become its own field. This book offers the most important contributions from the past fifteen years of international research into Hillesum’s work and life, studying her ethical, philosophical, spiritual, and literary existential search.
Reading Ezra 9-10 Tu'a-wise: Rethinking Biblical Interpretation in Oceania
Nasili Vaka'uta
SBL Press, 2011 An alternative approach to biblical interpretation from a Tongan standpoint
In Reading Ezra 9–10 Tu'a-wise, Nasili Vaka'uta establishes a theoretical framework for reading that is informed by Tongan cultural perspectives—in this case the “eye-/I-s” of a Tongan commoner (tu’a). She applies a methodology for analysis of biblical texts based on the established theoretical framework and tests the methodology on Ezra 9–10. The book emphasizes contextualizing the task of biblical interpretation (using contextual or specifically indigenous categories of analysis) rather than contextualizing the Bible (applying the insights from one’s reading to one’s situation).
Features
- Oceanic way of reading the Biblical texts
- Critical engagement with contextual biblical interpretation
- Practice-based interpretation
 Reading Faulkner: Introductions to the First Thirteen Novels
Richard Marius
University of Tennessee Press, 2005 Reading Faulkner: Introductions to the First Thirteen Novels is a collection of lectures by Harvard University professor and nationally known novelist and biographer Richard Marius. Marius had been charged with the task of teaching an introductory course on Faulkner to undergraduates in 1996 and 1997. Combining his love of Faulkner's writing with his own experiences as an author and teacher, Marius produced a series of delightful lectures-which stand on their own as sparkling, well-rounded essays-that help beginning students in understanding the sometimes difficult work of this celebrated literary master.
An expository treatment of Faulkner's major works, Reading Faulkner comprises essays that are arranged in roughly chronological order, corresponding to Faulkner's development as a writer. In a way sure to captivate the imagination of a new reader of Faulkner, Marius explicates themes in Faulkner's work, and he sheds light on the larger social history that marked Faulkner's literary production.
In addition, Marius is a southerner who grew up a couple of generations after Faulkner and, like Faulkner, turned his own world into the setting for his fiction. This unique perspective, combined with Marius's thorough readings of the novels, grounded in basic Faulkner criticism, provides an engaging and accessible self-guided tour through Faulkner's career.
Reading Faulkner is perfect for students from high school through the undergraduate level and will be enjoyed by general readers as well.
Richard Marius (1933-1999) taught at the University of Tennessee before heading Harvard's expository writing program from 1978 to 1998. He was the author of Thomas More, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death, and four novels about his native East Tennessee.
Nancy Grisham Anderson is an associate professor of English at Auburn University, Montgomery. She is the author of The Writer's Audience: A Reader for Composition and the editor of They Call Me Kay: A Courtship in Letters, and Wrestling with God: The Meditations of Richard Marius. She was a longtime friend of Richard Marius.
 Reading for Form, Volume 61
Susan Wolfson and Marshall Brown
Duke University Press In response to trends in criticism in recent decades, this special issue of Modern Language Quarterly contains new essays by prominent literary critics reasserts and refreshes the crucial importance of studying form for a productive understanding of complex issues that have frequently been oversimplified. It includes Heather Dubrow, answering New Historicist accounts of country house ideology, J. Paul Hunter reclaiming attention to eighteenth-century couplet structures, and Garrett Stewart arguing for the comprehensive import of the local syntactic forms in syllepsis in Dickens. Ronald Levao recovers the ethical urgency behind stylistic individuation in Milton; Frances Ferguson reveals the ideology of character within Austen’s free indirect discourse; Franco Moretti traces the history of the clue as formal device in detective fiction; and Robert Kaufman shows how formal dynamics derived from Kant and Adorno animate some of the most disruptive contemporary poetry. The history of formalism is the topic of Catherine Gallagher’s meditation on the dialogue of form and time since Percy Shelley and of Virgil Nemoianu’s account of the political vicissitudes of form in the twentieth century. These wide-ranging critical interventions are introduced by Susan Wolfson’s reflections on form today and by Ellen Rooney’s polemical appeal to cultural theorists not to defeat their purposes by neglecting form. Contributors. Heather Dubrow, Frances Ferguson, Catherine Gallagher, J. Paul Hunter, Robert Kaufman, Ronald Levao, Franco Moretti, Virgil Nemoianu, Ellen Rooney, Garrett Stewart
 Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel
Erika Wright
Ohio University Press, 2016 In Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Erika Wright argues that the emphasis in Victorian Studies on disease as the primary source of narrative conflict that must be resolved has obscured the complex reading practices that emerge around the concept of health. By shifting attention to the ways that prevention of illness and the preservation of well-being operate in fiction, both thematically and structurally, Wright offers a new approach to reading character and voice, order and temporality, setting and metaphor. As Wright reveals, while canonical works by Austen, Brontë, Dickens, Martineau, and Gaskell register the pervasiveness of a conventional “therapeutic” form of action and mode of reading, they demonstrate as well an equally powerful investment in the achievement and maintenance of “health”—what Wright refers to as a “hygienic” narrative—both in personal and domestic conduct and in social interaction of the individual within the community.
 Reading for Realism: The History of a U.S. Literary Institution, 1850–1910
Nancy Glazener
Duke University Press, 1997 Reading for Realism presents a new approach to U.S. literary history that is based on the analysis of dominant reading practices rather than on the production of texts. Nancy Glazener’s focus is the realist novel, the most influential literary form of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—a form she contends was only made possible by changes in the expectations of readers about pleasure and literary value. By tracing readers’ collaboration in the production of literary forms, Reading for Realism turns nineteenth-century controversies about the realist, romance, and sentimental novels into episodes in the history of readership. It also shows how works of fiction by Rebecca Harding Davis, Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others participated in the debates about literary classification and reading that, in turn, created and shaped their audiences.
Combining reception theory with a materialist analysis of the social formations in which realist reading practices circulated, Glazener’s study reveals the elitist underpinnings of literary realism. At the book’s center is the Atlantic group of magazines, whose influence was part of the cultural machinery of the Northeastern urban bourgeoisie and crucial to the development of literary realism in America. Glazener shows how the promotion of realism by this group of publications also meant a consolidation of privilege—primarily in terms of class, gender, race, and region—for the audience it served. Thus American realism, so often portrayed as a quintessentially populist form, actually served to enforce existing structures of class and power.
 Reading for Reform: The Social Work of Literature in the Progressive Era
Laura R. Fisher
University of Minnesota Press, 2019 An unprecedented examination of class-bridging reform and U.S. literary history at the turn of the twentieth century
Reading for Reform rewrites the literary history of late nineteenth and early twentieth century America by putting social reform institutions at the center of literary and cultural analysis. Examining the vibrant, often fractious literary cultures that developed as part of the Progressive mandate to uplift the socially disadvantaged, it shows that in these years reformers saw literature as a way to combat the myriad social problems that plagued modern U.S. society. As they developed distinctly literary methods for Americanizing immigrants, uplifting and refining wage-earning women, and educating black students, their institutions gave rise to a new social purpose for literature. Class-bridging reform institutions—the urban settlement house, working girls’ club, and African American college—are rarely addressed in literary history. Yet, Laura R. Fisher argues, they engendered important experiments in the form and social utility of American literature, from minor texts of Yiddish drama and little-known periodical and reform writers to the fiction of Edith Wharton and Nella Larsen. Fisher delves into reform’s vast and largely unexplored institutional archives to show how dynamic sites of modern literary culture developed at the margins of social power. Fisher reveals how reformist approaches to race, class, religion, and gender formation shaped American literature between the 1880s and the 1920s. In doing so, she tells a new story about the fate of literary practice, and the idea of literature’s practical value, during the very years that modernist authors were proclaiming art’s autonomy from concepts of social utility.
 Reading for the Planet: Toward a Geomethodology
Christian Moraru
University of Michigan Press, 2015 In his new book, Christian Moraru argues that post-Cold War culture in general and, in particular, the literature, philosophy, and theory produced since 9/11 foreground an emergent “planetary” imaginary—a “planetarism”—binding in unprecedented ways the world’s peoples, traditions, and aesthetic practices. This imaginary, Moraru further contends, speaks to a world condition (“planetarity”) increasingly exhibited by human expression worldwide. Grappling with the symptoms of planetarity in the arts and the human sciences, the author insists, is a major challenge for today’s scholars—a challenge Reading for the Planet means to address. Thus, Moraru takes decisive steps toward a critical methodology—a “geomethodology”—for dealing with planetarism’s aesthetic and philosophical projections. Here, Moraru analyzes novels by Joseph O’Neill, Mircea Cartarescu, Sorj Chalandon, Zadie Smith, Orhan Pamuk, and Dai Sijie, among others, as demonstration of his paradigm.
Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative
Peter Brooks
Harvard University Press, 1992 A book which should appeal to both literary theorists and to readers of the novel, this study invites the reader to consider how the plot reflects the patterns of human destiny and seeks to impose a new meaning on life.
 Reading Fu Poetry: From the Han to Song Dynasties
Nicholas Morrow Williams
Arc Humanities Press, 2021 The fu genre (or “rhapsody” in English) is one of the major genres of Chinese poetry throughout imperial history. This volume presents close readings of representative works in the genre, spanning over a millennium of its history. Each chapter contains a complete translation of major fu poems, accompanied by an essay presenting the work or works in historical context and also examining their significance in contemporary culture. Ranging in style and topic from the exuberant accumulation of detail in Yang Xiong’s “Shu Capital,” translated by David R. Knechtges, to the luscious lyricism of Wang Bo’s “Spring Longings,” translated by Timothy W. K. Chan, the poems present a panorama of how the genre has been used for both personal and social expression. While the individual essays examine their respective subjects in depth and detail, collectively the essays also offer a sweeping survey of the fu genre from the Han (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.) through the Song (960–1279 C.E.) dynasty.
 Reading, Gender and Identity in Seventeenth-Century England
Hannah Jeans
University of London Press, 2025 A fresh and complex analysis of the identity of the woman reader in seventeenth-century England.
This ambitious and interdisciplinary book redraws the history of early modern Englishwomen’s reading, exploring the connections between gender, reading habits, and genre throughout the seventeenth century. Reading, Gender and Identity in Seventeenth-Century England challenges accepted historiographical narratives about reading that have privileged male experience and the impact of the Civil War; the book highlights the multiplicity and complexity of women’s reading practices, focusing on how women used reading in constructing their gender identity. Reading was a gendered act in the early modern period; across genres, women were depicted negotiating a range of gendered behavioral norms. From religious texts, romances, and cookbooks, to news, household records, and scientific and medical treatises, Jeans draws on archival sources across a wide range of writing types to offer a more complete picture of women’s reading experiences, ultimately questioning the accepted notion of the woman reader itself.
 Reading Gender in Judges: An Intertextual Approach
Shelley L. Birdsong
SBL Press, 2023 Much of the content of Judges can be understood only when read together with other parts of the Hebrew Bible. Narratives in Judges comment, criticize, and reinterpret other texts from across what became the canon, often by troubling gender, disrupting stereotypical binaries, and creating a kind of gender chaos. This volume brings together gender criticism and intertextuality, methods that logically align with intersectional lenses, to draw attention to how race, ethnicity, class, religion, ability, sex, and sexuality all play a role in how one is gendered in the book of Judges. Contributors Elizabeth H. P. Backfish, Shelley L. Birdsong, Zev Farber, Serge Frolov, Susanne Gillmayr-Bucher, Susan E. Haddox, Hyun Chul Paul Kim, Richard D. Nelson, Pamela J. W. Nourse, Tammi J. Schneider, Joy A. Schroeder, Soo Kim Sweeney, Rannfrid I. Lasine Thelle, J. Cornelis de Vos, Jennifer J. Williams, and Gregory T. K. Wong provide substantial new and significant contributions to the study of gender, the book of Judges, and biblical hermeneutics in general. This volume illustrates why biblical scholars and students need to take the intersectional identities of characters and their intertextual environments seriously.
 Reading Hegel: Irony, Recollection, Critique
Robert Lucas Scott
University of Chicago Press, 2025 Retrieves Hegelian speculative experience for literary theory.
The relationship between Hegel and literary theory has for a long time been both contested and paradoxical. On the one hand, “theory” is often skeptical of all that Hegel ostensibly stood for: idealism, systematicity, and identity at the expense of difference. Yet, in spite of itself, literary theory is taken to owe a profound debt to Hegel’s philosophy. Robert Lucas Scott’s book complicates this account and argues that literary theory has made the mistake of abstracting Hegel’s thought from its more dynamic presentation in Hegel’s writings, reducing “Hegel” to a series of propositions or positions. Literary theory, Scott argues, misses what is perhaps the greatest innovation of Hegel’s philosophy: a presentation of experience that begins precisely by setting aside all preconceptions or prior assumptions. It is on this point that Hegel’s philosophy itself approaches literature: its content cannot be simply abstracted from the singular experience of reading it. Only through a mode of reading alive to speculative experience can literary theory become truly Hegelian. Scott’s exposition of Hegel offers a model of reading with relevance beyond philosophy: one that is critical without pretensions of mastery and detachment and that honors the singularity of the reading experience without succumbing to the subjectivism of the “postcritical.”
The book also includes engagements with the work of Luther, Kant, Marx, Gillian Rose, Fredric Jameson, Robert Brandom, Catherine Malabou, and more in its recovery of Hegel’s thought for a critical understanding of our time.
 Reading History Sideways: The Fallacy and Enduring Impact of the Developmental Paradigm on Family Life
Arland Thornton
University of Chicago Press, 2005 European and American scholars from the eighteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries thought that all societies passed through the same developmental stages, from primitive to advanced. Implicit in this developmental paradigm—one that has affected generations of thought on societal development—was the assumption that one could "read history sideways." That is, one could see what the earlier stages of a modern Western society looked like by examining contemporaneous so-called primitive societies in other parts of the world.
In Reading History Sideways, leading family scholar Arland Thornton demonstrates how this approach, though long since discredited, has permeated Western ideas and values about the family. Further, its domination of social science for centuries caused the misinterpretation of Western trends in family structure, marriage, fertility, and parent-child relations. Revisiting the "developmental fallacy," Thornton here traces its central role in changes in the Western world, from marriage to gender roles to adolescent sexuality. Through public policies, aid programs, and colonialism, it continues to reshape families in non-Western societies as well.
 Reading Holinshed's Chronicles
Annabel Patterson
University of Chicago Press, 1994 Reading Holinshed's Chronicles is the first major study of the greatest of the Elizabethan chronicles. Holinshed's Chronicles—a massive history of England, Scotland, and Ireland—has been traditionally read as the source material for many of Shakespeare's plays or as an archaic form of history-writing. Annabel Patterson insists that the Chronicles be read in their own right as an important and inventive cultural history.
Although we know it by the name of Raphael Holinshed, editor and major compiler of the 1577 edition, the Chronicles was the work of a group, a collaboration between antiquarians, clergymen, members of parliament, poets, publishers, and booksellers. Through a detailed reading, Patterson argues that the Chronicles convey rich insights into the way the Elizabethan middle class understood their society. Responding to the crisis of disunity which resulted from the Reformation, the authors of the Chronicles embodied and encouraged an ideal of justice, what we would now call liberalism, that extended beyond the writing of history into the realms of politics, law, economics, citizenship, class, and gender. Also, since the second edition of 1587 was called in by the Privy Council and revised under supervision, the work constitutes an important test case for the history of early modern censorship.
An essential book for all students of Tudor history and literature, Reading Holinshed's Chronicles brings into full view a long misunderstood masterpiece of sixteenth-century English culture.
 Reading Homer's Iliad
Kostas Myrsiades
Bucknell University Press, 2023 We still read Homer’s epic the Iliad two-and-one-half millennia since its emergence for the questions it poses and the answers it provides for our age, as viable today as they were in Homer’s own times. What is worth dying for? What is the meaning of honor and fame? What are the consequences of intense emotion and violence? What does recognition of one’s mortality teach? We also turn to Homer’s Iliad in the twenty-first century for the poet’s preoccupation with the essence of human life. His emphasis on human understanding of mortality, his celebration of the human mind, and his focus on human striving after consciousness and identity has led audiences to this epic generation after generation. This study is a book-by-book commentary on the epic’s 24 parts, meant to inform students new to the work. Endnotes clarify and elaborate on myths that Homer leaves unfinished, explain terms and phrases, and provide background information. The volume concludes with a general bibliography of work on the Iliad, in addition to bibliographies accompanying each book’s commentary.
 Reading Homer’s Odyssey
Kostas Myrsiades
Bucknell University Press, 2019 Finalist for the 2020 PROSE Awards, Classics section
Homer’s Odyssey is the first great travel narrative in Western culture. A compelling tale about the consequences of war, and about redemption, transformation, and the search for home, the Odyssey continues to be studied in universities and schools, and to be read and referred to by ordinary readers. Reading Homer’s Odyssey offers a book-by-book commentary on the epic’s themes that informs the non-specialist and engages the seasoned reader in new perspectives. Among the themes discussed are hospitality, survival, wealth, reputation and immortality, the Olympian gods, self-reliance and community, civility, behavior, etiquette and technology, ease, inactivity and stagnation, Penelope’s relationship with Odysseus, Telemachus’ journey, Odysseus’ rejection of Calypso’s offer of immortality, Odysseus’ lies, Homer’s use of the House of Atreus and other myths, the cinematic qualities of the epic’s structure, women’s role in the epic, and the Odyssey’s true ending. Footnotes clarify and elaborate upon myths that Homer leaves unfinished, explain terms and phrases, and provide background information. The volume concludes with a general bibliography of work on the Odyssey, in addition to the bibliographies that accompany each book’s commentary.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Reading Huizinga
Willem Otterspeer
Amsterdam University Press, 2011 Johan Huizinga, the Dutch founding father of cultural history, ranks among the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Perhaps best known is Huizinga’s revolutionary insight into the formative role of play in human culture, a theory he espoused in the celebrated Homo Ludens, which was published in 1938. For Huizinga, philology was the mother of all interpretive endeavors, reading and writing were part of a collective ritual that channeled human passion into beautiful forms, and passion remained the fundamental fact of human life. In this clear, engaging study, the renowned Dutch scholar Willem Otterspeer paints an original portrait of Huizinga in the context of interwar Europe—and shares his subject’s own hallmark passion for history.
 Reading in a Digital Age
David M. Durant
Against the Grain, LLC, 2017 Charleston Briefings: Trending Topics for Information Professionals is a thought-provoking series of brief books concerning innovation in the sphere of libraries, publishing, and technology in scholarly communication. The briefings, growing out of the vital conversations characteristic of the Charleston Conference and Against the Grain, will offer valuable insights into the trends shaping our professional lives and the institutions in which we work.
The Charleston Briefings are written by authorities who provide an effective, readable overview of their topics—not an academic monograph. The intended audience is busy nonspecialist readers who want to be informed concerning important issues in our industry in an accessible and timely manner.
How is reading changing in the digital environment? How will it continue to change? Are we headed for an all- digital future? Or does print still have a place in the reading environment? Does format matter? What do readers tell us they want? This brief monograph offers librarians, publishers, vendors, and others an overview of these key issues as well as advice on how their institutions should approach the print versus digital controversy.
 Reading In Christian Communities 2002
Bobertz
University of Notre Dame Press, 2002 The essays in this book honor and extend the work of Rowan A. Greer, Walter H. Gray Professor Emeritus of Anglican Studies at Yale University Divinity School, by exploring the connections between textual interpretation and the formation of religious identity. A diverse and prestigious group of biblical scholars, church historians, and theologians studies the role that scripture plays in the creation and maintenance of faith communities and the ways that communal locations in turn shape the interpretation of scripture.
The first part of the book examines specific examples of ancient biblical interpretation as a means of creating, maintaining, and challenging Christian identity in the pluralistic ancient world. Authors study interpretation in the Martyrdom of Polycarp, the Physiologus, Gnostic literature, the fifth-century mosaic of the Church of Hosios David in Thessaloniki, and in the works of Irenaeus, Origen, Augustine, John Chrysostom, and Porphyry of Tyre. Reading scripture emerges as a strategy for locating the reader and his or her community with respect to other Christians, Jews, and pagans. Part 2 of the volume considers the general problem of interpretation within Christian communities, whether ancient or modern, as they face the task of maintaining a coherent identity.
Contributors to this book--all students, colleagues, and friends of Rowan Greer--are Charles A. Bobertz, David Brakke, Mary Rose D'Angelo, Stanley Hauerwas, Martha F. Meeks, Wayne A. Meeks, Frederick W. Norris, Richard A. Norris, Jr., Alan Scott, Arthur Bradford Shippee, Michael Bland Simmons, and Frederick W. Weidmann.
CHARLES A. BOBERTZ is associate professor of theology at St. John's University School of Theology and Seminary, Collegeville, Minnesota.
DAVID BRAKKE is associate professor of religious studies and director of graduate studies in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.
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"This is a wide-ranging collection of essays providing a fitting tribute to the work of Rowan Greer. The key theme is both theological and hermeneutical, focusing on interpretive communities and their vital role in reading scripture. The historical dimension of these studies illuminates the current situation. This is a timely work, as well as a fascinatingly varied collection." --Frances Young, Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology, University of Birmingham
"An unusually rich and nuanced set of essays celebrating and enacting the current renaissance and reconceptualization of the field of patristic biblical engagement that Rowan Greer has done so much to instigate. A must-read for those who wish to be a part of this vibrant conversation." --Margaret M. Mitchell, Associate Professor of New Testament and Chair, Department of New Testament and Early Christian Literature, University of Chicago
 Reading in the Postgenomic Age: Race, Discipline, and Bionarrativity in Contemporary North American Literature
Lesley Larkin
Ohio State University Press, 2025 In Reading in the Postgenomic Age, Lesley Larkin analyzes how writers across literary genres have reckoned with the launch (in the early 1990s) and completion (in 2003) of the Human Genome Project and the ways it has fallen short of its promise to do away with spurious notions of race. Authors such as Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Ruth Ozeki, Rebecca Skloot, Gerald Vizenor, and others demonstrate that genomics is a premier terrain upon which race is being reinscribed and reimagined in both scientific and mainstream contexts. Through construction of alternate genealogies, invention of hybrids, and citation of the textual metaphors replete within genomic discourse, these writers have illuminated the ethical, cultural, social, and political ramifications of genomic research, attuning readers to postgenomic discourses of race and power. At the same time, Larkin contends that literature’s engagement with genomics goes beyond its initial critique to comment self-reflexively on the practices and value of literary studies. Ultimately, she argues that contemporary writers outline a new ethical matrix for reading race in the postgenomic era—and rethinks literary criticism within this new paradigm.
 Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England
Jessica Brantley
University of Chicago Press, 2007 Just as twenty-first-century technologies like blogs and wikis have transformed the once private act of reading into a public enterprise, devotional reading experiences in the Middle Ages were dependent upon an oscillation between the solitary and the communal. In Reading in the Wilderness, Jessica Brantley uses tools from both literary criticism and art history to illuminate Additional MS 37049, an illustrated Carthusian miscellany housed in the British Library. This revealing artifact, Brantley argues, closes the gap between group spectatorship and private study in late medieval England.
Drawing on the work of W. J. T. Mitchell, Michael Camille, and others working at the image-text crossroads, Reading in the Wilderness addresses the manuscript’s texts and illustrations to examine connections between reading and performance within the solitary monk’s cell and also outside. Brantley reimagines the medieval codex as a site where the meanings of images and words are performed, both publicly and privately, in the act of reading.
 Reading in These Times: Purposes and Practices of Minoritized Biblical Criticism
Tat-siong Benny Liew
SBL Press, 2024 In this follow-up to They Were All Together in One Place? (2009) and Reading Biblical Texts Together (2022), biblical scholars from different racial/ethnic minoritized communities move beyond defining and pursing cross-cultural interpretation to investigating how spatial-geographical and temporal-historical locations affect the purposes and practices of minoritized biblical criticism today. Through an examination of a range of contemporary issues from HIV/AIDS to US immigration policy, contributors establish that how and why they engage the Bible are the result of the intersection of social and cultural factors. Contributors Cheryl B. Anderson, Hector Avalos†, Jacqueline M. Hidalgo, Tat-siong Benny Liew, Yii-Jan Lin, Vanessa Lovelace, Francisco Lozada Jr., Roger S. Nam, Aliou Cissé Niang, Hugh R. Page Jr., Jean-Pierre Ruiz, Fernando F. Segovia, Abraham Smith, and Vincent L. Wimbush demonstrate that interpretations carry broader implications for society and that scholars have ethical and political responsibilities to their communities and to the world.
 Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century
Cristanne Miller
University of Massachusetts Press, 2012 This book provides new information about Emily Dickinson as a writer and new ways of situating this poet in relation to nineteenth-century literary culture, examining how we read her poetry and how she was reading the poetry of her own day. Cristanne Miller argues both that Dickinson's poetry is formally far closer to the verse of her day than generally imagined and that Dickinson wrote, circulated, and retained poems differently before and after 1865. Many current conceptions of Dickinson are based on her late poetic practice. Such conceptions, Miller contends, are inaccurate for the time when she wrote the great majority of her poems.
Before 1865, Dickinson at least ambivalently considered publication, circulated relatively few poems, and saved almost everything she wrote in organized booklets. After this date, she wrote far fewer poems, circulated many poems without retaining them, and took less interest in formally preserving her work. Yet, Miller argues, even when circulating relatively few poems, Dickinson was vitally engaged with the literary and political culture of her day and, in effect, wrote to her contemporaries. Unlike previous accounts placing Dickinson in her era, Reading in Time demonstrates the extent to which formal properties of her poems borrow from the short-lined verse she read in schoolbooks, periodicals, and single-authored volumes. Miller presents Dickinson's writing in relation to contemporary experiments with the lyric, the ballad, and free verse, explores her responses to American Orientalism, presents the dramatic lyric as one of her preferred modes for responding to the Civil War, and gives us new ways to understand the patterns of her composition and practice of poetry.
Reading in Tudor England
Eugene R. Kintgen
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996 Readers in the sixteenth century read (that is, interpreted) texts quite differently from the way contemporary readers do; they were trained to notice different aspects of a text and to process them differently.
Using educational works of Erasmus, Ascham, and others, commentaries on literary works, various kinds of religious guides and homilies, and self-improvement books, Kintgen has found specific evidence of these differences and makes imaginative use of it to draw fascinating and convincing conclusions about the art and practice of reading. Kintgen ends by situating the book within literary theory, cognitive science, and literary studies.
Among the writers covered are Gabriel Harvey, E. K. (the commentator on The Shepheardes Calendar), Sir John Harrington, George Gascoigne, George Puttenham, Thomas Blundeville, and Angel Day.
 Reading Inca History
Catherine Julien
University of Iowa Press, 2002 At the heart of this book is the controversy over whether Inca history can and should be read as history. Did the Incas narrate a true reflection of their past, and did the Spaniards capture these narratives in a way that can be meaningfully reconstructed? In Reading Inca History,Catherine Julien finds that the Incas did indeed create detectable life histories. The two historical genres that contributed most to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish narratives about the Incas were an official account of Inca dynastic genealogy and a series of life histories of Inca rulers. Rather than take for granted that there was an Inca historical consciousness, Julien begins by establishing an Inca purpose for keeping this dynastic genealogy. She then compares Spanish narratives of the Inca past to identify the structure of underlying Inca genres and establish the dependency on oral sources. Once the genealogical genre can be identified, the life histories can also be detected. By carefully studying the composition of Spanish narratives and their underlying sources, Julien provides an informed and convincing reading of these complex texts. By disentangling the sources of their meaning, she reaches across time, language, and cultural barriers to achieve a rewarding understanding of the dynamics of Inca and colonial political history.
 Reading India Now: Contemporary Formations in Literature and Popular Culture
Ulka Anjaria
Temple University Press, 2019 In an age of social media and reality television, reading and consumption habits in India now demand homegrown pulp fictions. Ulka Anjaria categorizes post-2000 Indian literature and popular culture as constituting “the contemporary,” a movement defined by new and experimental forms—where high- and low-brow meet, and genres break down. Reading India Now studies the implications of this developing trend as both the right-wing resurges and marginalized voices find expression. Anjaria explores the fiction of Chetan Bhagat and Anuja Chauhan as well as Aamir Khan’s television talk show, Satyamev Jayate, plus the work of documentarian Paromita Vohra, to argue how different kinds of texts are involved in imagining new political futures for an India in transition. Contemporary literature and popular culture in India might seem artless and capitalistic, but it is precisely its openness to the world outside that allows these new works to offer significant insight into the experiences and sensibilities of contemporary India.
 Reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau through the Prism of Chess
Florian Vauléon
University of Michigan Press, 2019 Over a period of forty years, Rousseau combined his devotion to writing with his enthusiasm for chess, and these two passions necessarily intertwined. Rousseau was able to transfer his power of concentration and the strict dialectics of his literary writings to his chess strategy. If Rousseau’s analytical skills influenced his attitude toward the game, then the game of chess inspired his logic and affected his discourse. Interpreted as a form of rationality, as a conceptual paradigm, the rules and strategies of chess accurately describe Rousseau’s ideas for social management, political power, and organization. Reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau through the Prism of Chess shows that Rousseau’s political theory, though allegedly inspired by Nature, found a perfect model in a game created by mankind; chess thus became a reference for his philosophical discourse and practice as well as a method to systematize Nature and organize society.
 Reading Job with St. Thomas Aquinas
Matthew Levering
Catholic University of America Press, 2020 Reading Job with St. Thomas Aquinas is a scholarly contribution to Thomistic studies, specifically to the study of Aquinas’s biblical exegesis in relation to his philosophy and theology. Each of the thirteen chapters has a different focus, within the shared concentration of the book on Aquinas’s Literal Exposition on Job. The essays are arranged in three Parts: “Job and Sacra Doctrina”; “Providence and Suffering”; and “Job and the Moral Life”. Boyle’s opening essay argues that Aquinas’s commentary seeks to show what is required in the “Magister” (namely, Job and God) for the effective communication of wisdom. Mansini’s essay argues that by speaking, God reveals the virtue of Job and its value in God’s providence; without the personal revelation or speech of God, Job could not have known the value of his suffering. Vijgen’s essay explores the commentary’s use of Aristotle for reflecting upon divine providence, sorrow and anger, resurrection, and the new heavens and new earth. Levering’s essay explores the commentary’s citations of the Gospel of John and argues that these pertain especially to divine speech and to light/darkness. Bonino’s essay explains why divine incomprehensibility does not mean that Job is wrong to seek to understand God’s ways. Te Velde’s essay explores how Aquinas’s commentary draws upon the reasoning of his Summa contra gentiles with regard to the good order of the universe. Goris’s essay reflects upon how, according to Aquinas’s commentary, sin is and is not related to suffering. Knasas’s essay argues that Aquinas does not hold that the resurrection of the body is a necessary philosophical corollary of the human desire for happiness. Wawrykow’s essay explores merit, in relation to the connection between sin and punishment/affliction as well as to the connection between good actions and flourishing. Spezzano’s essay shows that Job’s hope and filial fear transform his suffering, making him an exemplar of the consolation they provide to the just. Mullady’s essay reflects upon the moral problems and opportunities posed by the passions, along with the ordering of the virtues to the reward of human happiness. Flood’s essay shows how Aquinas defends Job’s possession of the qualities needed for true friendship (including friendship with God), such as patience, delight in the presence of the friend, and compassion. Lastly, Kromholtz’s essay argues that although Aquinas’s Literal Exposition on Job never extensively engages eschatology, Aquinas depends throughout upon the reasonableness of hoping for the resurrection of the body and the final judgment.
Reading Junot Diaz
Christopher Gonzalez
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015 Dominican American author and Pulitzer Prize–winner Junot Díaz has gained international fame for his blended, cross-cultural fiction. Reading Junot Díaz is the first study to focus on his complete body of published works. It explores the totality of his work and provides a concise view of the interconnected and multilayered narrative that weaves throughout Díaz’s writings. Christopher González analyzes both the formal and thematic features and discusses the work in the context of speculative and global fiction as well as Caribbean and Latino/a culture and language. Topics such as race, masculinity, migration, and Afro-Latinidad are examined in depth. González provides a synthesis of the prevailing critical studies of Díaz and offers many new insights into his work.
 Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism
Steven B. Smith
University of Chicago Press, 2006 Interest in Leo Strauss is greater now than at any time since his death, mostly because of the purported link between his thought and the political movement known as neoconservatism. Steven B. Smith, though, surprisingly depicts Strauss not as the high priest of neoconservatism but as a friend of liberal democracy—perhaps the best defender democracy has ever had. Moreover, in Reading Leo Strauss, Smith shows that Strauss’s defense of liberal democracy was closely connected to his skepticism of both the extreme Left and extreme Right.
Smith asserts that this philosophical skepticism defined Strauss’s thought. It was as a skeptic, Smith argues, that Strauss considered the seemingly irreconcilable conflict between reason and revelation—a conflict Strauss dubbed the “theologico-political problem.” Calling this problem “the theme of my investigations,” Strauss asked the same fundamental question throughout his life: what is the relation of the political order to revelation in general and Judaism in particular? Smith organizes his book with this question, first addressing Strauss’s views on religion and then examining his thought on philosophical and political issues.
In his investigation of these philosophical and political issues, Smith assesses Strauss’s attempt to direct the teaching of political science away from the examination of mass behavior and interest group politics and toward the study of the philosophical principles on which politics are based. With his provocative, lucid essays, Smith goes a long way toward establishing a distinctive form of Straussian liberalism.
 READING LONDON: URBAN SPECULATION AND IMAGINATIVE GOVERNMENT EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE
ERIK BOND
Ohio State University Press, 2007 While seventeenth-century London may immediately evoke images of Shakespeare and thatched roof-tops and nineteenth-century London may call forth images of Dickens and cobblestones, a popular conception of eighteenth-century London has been more difficult to imagine. In fact, the immense variety of textual traditions, metaphors, classical allusions, and contemporary contexts that eighteenth-century writers use to illustrate eighteenth-century London may make eighteenth-century London seem more strange and foreign to twenty-first-century readers than any of its other historical reincarnations. Indeed, “imagining” a familiar, unified London was precisely the task that occupied so many writers in London after the 1666 Fire decimated the City and the 1688 Glorious Revolution destabilized the English monarchy’s absolute power. In the authoritative void created by these two events, writers in London faced not only the problem of how to guide readers’ imaginations to a unified conception of London, but also the problem of how to govern readers whom they would never meet. Erik Bond argues that Restoration London’s rapidly changing administrative geography as well as mid-eighteenth-century London’s proliferation of print helped writers generate several strategies to imagine that they could control not only other Londoners but also their interior selves. As a result, Reading London encourages readers to respect the historical alterity or “otherness” of eighteenth-century literature while recognizing that these historical alternatives prove that our present problems with urban societies do not have to be this way. In fact, the chapters illustrate how eighteenth-century writers gesture towards solutions to problems that urban citizens now face in terms of urban terror, crime, policing, and communal conduct.
 Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance
Ada Palmer
Harvard University Press, 2014 After its rediscovery in 1417, Lucretius’s Epicurean didactic poem De Rerum Natura threatened to supply radicals and atheists with the one weapon unbelief had lacked in the Middle Ages: good answers. Scholars could now challenge Christian patterns of thought by employing the theory of atomistic physics, a sophisticated system that explained natural phenomena without appeal to divine participation, and argued powerfully against the immortality of the soul, the afterlife, and a creator God.
Ada Palmer explores how Renaissance readers, such as Machiavelli, Pomponio Leto, and Montaigne, actually ingested and disseminated Lucretius, and the ways in which this process of reading transformed modern thought. She uncovers humanist methods for reconciling Christian and pagan philosophy, and shows how ideas of emergent order and natural selection, so critical to our current thinking, became embedded in Europe’s intellectual landscape before the seventeenth century. This heterodoxy circulated in the premodern world, not on the conspicuous stage of heresy trials and public debates, but in the classrooms, libraries, studies, and bookshops where quiet scholars met the ideas that would soon transform the world. Renaissance readers—poets and philologists rather than scientists—were moved by their love of classical literature to rescue Lucretius and his atomism, thereby injecting his theories back into scientific discourse.
Palmer employs a new quantitative method for analyzing marginalia in manuscripts and printed books, exposing how changes in scholarly reading practices over the course of the sixteenth century gradually expanded Europe’s receptivity to radical science, setting the stage for the scientific revolution.
 Reading Machines: Toward and Algorithmic Criticism
Stephen Ramsay
University of Illinois Press, 2011 Besides familiar and now-commonplace tasks that computers do all the time, what else are they capable of? Stephen Ramsay's intriguing study of computational text analysis examines how computers can be used as "reading machines" to open up entirely new possibilities for literary critics. Computer-based text analysis has been employed for the past several decades as a way of searching, collating, and indexing texts. Despite this, the digital revolution has not penetrated the core activity of literary studies: interpretive analysis of written texts. Computers can handle vast amounts of data, allowing for the comparison of texts in ways that were previously too overwhelming for individuals, but they may also assist in enhancing the entirely necessary role of subjectivity in critical interpretation. Reading Machines discusses the importance of this new form of text analysis conducted with the assistance of computers. Ramsay suggests that the rigidity of computation can be enlisted in the project of intuition, subjectivity, and play.
Reading Marx: On Transcendental Materialism
Reiner Schürmann
Diaphanes, 2020 In this book, Reiner Schürmann argues that what is most original about Marx is his philosophical axis. Extending his highly original engagement with the history of philosophy, Schürmann draws out this axis, which determines and localizes his theories of history, social relations, and economy. Whereas Marxist readings of Marx conceive history, classes, and social relations as primary realities, Schürmann brings out a radically immanent understanding of praxis that introduces multiplicity. This edition is complemented by a reprinting of Schürmann’s Anti-Humanism essay, in which he reads Marx alongside Nietzsche and Heidegger as spelling out the dissociation of being and action. Reading Marx showcases underappreciated facets of Schürmann’s work and offers an interpretation of Marx that resonates with the readings of Jacques Derrida, Michel Henry, Antonio Negri, and François Laruelle.
 Reading Medieval Images: The Art Historian and the Object
Elizabeth Sears and Thelma K. Thomas, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2002 What is it that art historians do when they approach works of art?
What kind of language do they use to descibe what they see? How do they construct arguments using visual evidence? What sorts of arguments do they make? In this unusual anthology, eighteen prominent art historians specializing in the medieval field (European, Byzantine, and Islamic) provide answers to these fundamental questions, not directly but by way of example. Each author, responding to invitation, has chosen for study a single image or object and has submitted it to sustained analysis. The collection of essays, accompanied by statements on methodology by the editors, offers an accessible introduction to current art-historical practice. Elizabeth Sears is George H. Forsyth Jr. Collegiate Professor of Art at the University of Michigan. She has received numerous fellowships and awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, a Research Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, and a Paul Mellon Centre Fellowship at the British School in Rome. Thelma K. Thomas is Associate Professor of the History of Art and Associate Curator of the Kelsey Museum, University of Michigan.
 Reading Medieval Latin with the Legend of Barlaam and Josaphat
Donka D. Markus
University of Michigan Press, 2018 In Reading Medieval Latin with the Legend of Barlaam and Josaphat, Donka D. Markus offers comprehensive commentary on the 13th-century Dominican theologian Jacobus de Voragine’s retelling of the ancient story of the life of the Buddha that will resonate with contemporary students of Latin. Jacobus’s version of the legend serves as a compelling, original Latin text. Vividly conveyed through parables, fables, and anecdotes, it naturally lends itself to a critical consideration of ethical principles and philosophical truths commonly shared across many cultures. With its rich stylistic devices and authentic classical Latin word order, it provides superb training for reading rhetorical prose before advancing to the works of more complex classical prose authors. At the same time, the text offers a unique opportunity for systematically learning the special features of Late and Medieval Latin. Included in this volume are two presentations of Jacobus’s text: one maintaining the original orthography reflecting Latin as it appears in medieval manuscripts, and one in which the orthography follows Classical Latin norms. This textbook is designed for intermediate-level learners of Classical or Medieval Latin, whether in college, high school, or by self-directed study. The 5,000-word narrative text lends itself to a semester-long experience of reading one continuous work of prose. Each of the legend’s embedded stories can also be read as an independent selection with the help of the ample commentary, vocabulary, and grammar guidance. The extensive introduction provides the necessary background to contextualize the legend in its Latin iteration and sufficient historical information to make the reading meaningful for those without prior knowledge of Buddhism or medieval history. Additionally, this work makes Latin attractive to students of diverse backgrounds, as it highlights the language’s important role in disseminating the universally shared cultural legacy of humanity.
Reading Memory Sites Through Signs: Hiding into Landscape
Cristina Demaria
Amsterdam University Press, 2023 What can space tell us about our past? Which stories do memory sites narrate? Which memories do they transmit? And, more importantly, how can we read their meanings? Semiotics can provide us with a homogeneous, shareable and theoretically sound methodology to analyse space within a comparable and common frame of reference for scholars of memory studies and traumatic heritage, as well as for historians, architects and museum curators. The book describes in clear and understandable language the main semiotic concepts that can be used to analyse space, illustrating them with carefully chosen case studies of memory spaces – monuments, museums, post-war urban restoration, filmed and virtual space – in order to show the applicability and efficacy of a semiotic methodology.
 Reading National Geographic
Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins
University of Chicago Press, 1993 For its millions of readers, the National Geographic has long been a window to the world of exotic peoples and places. In this fascinating account of an American institution, Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins explore the possibility that the magazine, in purporting to teach us about distant cultures, actually tells us much more about our own.
Lutz and Collins take us inside the National Geographic Society to investigate how its photographers, editors, and designers select images and text to produce representations of Third World cultures. Through interviews with the editors, they describe the process as one of negotiating standards of "balance" and "objectivity," informational content and visual beauty. Then, in a close reading of some six hundred photographs, they examine issues of race, gender, privilege, progress, and modernity through an analysis of the way such things as color, pose, framing, and vantage point are used in representations of non-Western peoples. Finally, through extensive interviews with readers, the authors assess how the cultural narratives of the magazine are received and interpreted, and identify a tension between the desire to know about other peoples and their ways and the wish to validate middle-class American values.
The result is a complex portrait of an institution and its role in promoting a kind of conservative humanism that acknowledges universal values and celebrates diversity while it allows readers to relegate non-Western peoples to an earlier stage of progress. We see the magazine and the Society as a key middlebrow arbiter of taste, wealth, and power in America, and we get a telling glimpse into middle-class American culture and all the wishes, assumptions, and fears it brings to bear on our armchair explorations of the world.
 Reading Nature in the Early Middle Ages: Writing, Language, and Creation in the Latin Physiologus, ca. 700–1000
Anna Dorofeeva
Arc Humanities Press, 2024 This book is a new cultural and intellectual history of the natural world in the early medieval Latin West. It examines the complex relationships between language, texts, and the physical world they describe, focusing on the manuscripts of the Physiologus—the foundation of the medieval bestiary. The Physiologus helped to shape the post-Roman worldview about the role and place of human beings in Creation. This process drew on classical ideas, but in its emphasis on allegory, etymology, and a plurality of readings, it was original and distinctive. This study demonstrates precisely how the early medieval re-contextualization of existing knowledge, together with a substantial amount of new writing, set the course of ideas about faith and nature for centuries to come. In doing so, it establishes the importance of multi-text miscellanies for early medieval written culture.
 Reading Nature: The Evolution of American Nature Writing
John Seibert Farnsworth
Michigan State University Press, 2025 Reading Nature highlights the ten books that most influenced the scope and direction of literary natural history in the United States. It explores how American nature writing came to focus on the deep observation of wild landscapes and how the genre evolved over 163 years, beginning with the publication of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden in 1854. The volume also examines Mary Austin’s Land of Little Rain (1903), John Burroughs’s Ways of Nature (1905), Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (1949), Rachel Carson’s The Sea around Us (1951), Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire (1968), Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge (1991), Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), and J. Drew Lanham’s The Home Place (2016). This book features a series of close readings exploring how these authors transformed popular understanding of the natural world.
Reading Nephi Reading Isaiah: 2 Nephi 26–27
Joseph M. Spencer
Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 2016 Nephi's adoration of the words of Isaiah has puzzled many readers of the Book of Mormon. What does Nephi’s reading and repurposing of the biblical prophet suggest about the nature of prophecy and scripture study? Six scholars of the Mormon Theology Seminar address these and other questions in Reading Nephi Reading Isaiah. By shedding new light on this particular scriptural text, these essays provide exemplary models for improved scripture study.
 Reading Network Fiction
David Ciccoricco
University of Alabama Press, 2007 The marriage of narrative and the computer dates back to the 1980s, with the hypertext experiments of luminaries such as Judy Malloy and Michael Joyce. What has been variously called "hypertext fiction," "literary hypertext," and "hyperfiction" has surely surrendered any claim to newness in the 21st century. David Ciccoricco establishes the category of "network fiction" as distinguishable from other forms of hypertext and cybertext: network fictions are narrative texts in digitally networked environments that make use of hypertext technology in order to create emergent and recombinant narratives. Though they both pre-date and post-date the World Wide Web, they share with it an aesthetic drive that exploits the networking potential of digital composition and foregrounds notions of narrative recurrence and return. Ciccoricco analyzes innovative developments in network fiction from first-generation writers Michael Joyce (Twilight, a symphony, 1997) and Stuart Moulthrop (Victory Garden, 1991) through Judd Morrissey’s The Jew's Daughter (2000), an acclaimed example of digital literature in its latter instantiations on the Web. Each investigation demonstrates not only what the digital environment might mean for narrative theory but also the ability of network fictions to sustain a mode of reading that might, arguably, be called "literary." The movement in the arts away from representation and toward simulation, away from the dynamics of reading and interpretation and toward the dynamics of interaction and play, has indeed led to exaggerated or alarmist claims of the endangerment of the literary arts. At the same time, some have simply doubted that the conceptual and discursive intricacy of print fiction can migrate to new media. Against these claims, Reading Network Fiction attests to the verbal complexity and conceptual depth of a body of writing created for the surface of the screen.
 Reading Nietzsche
Mazzino Montinari
University of Illinois Press, 1982 An important figure in the development of Nietzsche scholarship, Mazzino Montinari (1928-86) dedicated himself to the detailed study of the philosopher’s writings. This lifetime of scholarship crystallized in Montinari’s work as coeditor of the critical edition of Nietzsche’s collected writings. Reading Nietzsche, now available in English for the first time, is a group of essays that grew out of this monumental work.
In Reading Nietzsche Montinari tackles such subjects as the relationship between Nietzsche and Wagner, early drafts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and the philosopher’s reputation among the Nazis and Marxists of the 1930s and 1940s. He also deals authoritatively with a number of figures who have had an unfortunate influence upon the way Nietzsche has been understood, from the chief Nazi interpreter of Nietzsche, Alfred Bäumler, to the chief Marxist interpreter, Georg Lukàcs, to Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth.
Reading North by South: On Latin American Literature, Culture, and Politics
Neil Larsen
University of Minnesota Press, 1995 Reading North by South was first published in 1995. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Neil Larsen is concerned with misleading interpretations of literature and culture that dominate Latin American studies in North America. In Reading North by South he attempts to correct the distorted views that have prevailed by proposing the need for a freshly conceived historical materialist approach to Latin American texts and cultural practices. Reading North by South opens with reflections on how North America has read Latin America since the advent of popular fiction from authors like Cortázar and García Márquez. Larsen argues that the North American academy tends to interpret Latin American texts through a postmodern lens of cultural politics that ignores historical realism, and he contends that more attention needs to be paid to historical and class issues. He provides insightful commentaries on political discourses, cultural events, films, and literary texts, and maintains that the canonization of the modernist aesthetic in the United States has resulted in a marginalization of writers and writing that reflect the historical realities of Latin American politics. As it analyzes important points of debate within and outside of Latin American studies, Reading North by South draws upon a wide diversity of texts written in Portuguese, Spanish and English. Of particular interest is Larsen's discussion of writings from the Caribbean, an area that is not frequently included in Latin American studies. Reading North by South will lead readers to question the expectations and preconceptions that inform their readings of Latin American literature. Neil Larsen is associate professor of Spanish and Latin American literature at Northeastern University. He is the author of Modernism and Hegemony: A Materialist Critique of Aesthetic Agencies (Minnesota, 1990), and editor of The Discourse of Power: Culture, Hegemony, and the Authoritarian State in Latin America (1983).
 Reading North Korea: An Ethnological Inquiry
Sonia Ryang
Harvard University Press, 2011 Often depicted as one of the world’s most strictly isolationist and relentlessly authoritarian regimes, North Korea has remained terra incognita to foreign researchers as a site for anthropological fieldwork. Given the difficulty of gaining access to the country and its people, is it possible to examine the cultural logic and social dynamics of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea?
In this innovative book, Sonia Ryang casts new light onto the study of North Korean culture and society by reading literary texts as sources of ethnographic data. Analyzing and interpreting the rituals and language embodied in a range of literary works published in the 1970s and 1980s, Ryang focuses critical attention on three central themes—love, war, and self—that reflect the nearly complete overlap of the personal, social, and political realms in North Korean society. The ideology embedded in these propagandistic works laid the cultural foundation for the nation as a “perpetual ritual state,” where social structures and personal relations are suspended in tribute to Kim Il Sung, the political and spiritual leader who died in 1994 but lives eternally in the hearts of his people and still weaves the social fabric of present-day North Korea.
Reading Novels
George Hughes
Vanderbilt University Press, 2002 Reading Novels is a unique piece of practical criticism, a comprehensive "poetics" of a genre that has not attracted a great deal of attention, at least not on this level. It is a reader's and student's guide that reaches beyond issues of individual texts and historical traditions to essential features of the form.
A Reading of Dante's Inferno
Wallace Fowlie
University of Chicago Press, 1981 This work is a guide to the reading of Dante's great poem, intended for the use of students and laymen, particularly those who are approaching the Inferno for the first time. While carefully pointing out the uniqueness, tone, and color of each of Dante's thirty-four cantos, Fowlie never loses sight of the continuity of the poet's discourse. Each canto is related thematically to others, and the rich web of symbols is displayed and disentangled as the poem's unity, patterns, and structures are revealed. What particularly distinguishes Wallace Fowlie's reading of the Inferno is his emphasis on both the timelessness and the timeliness of Dante's masterpiece. By underlining the archetypal elements in the poem and drawing parallels to contemporary literature, Fowlie has brought Dante and his characters much closer to modern readers.
 A Reading of Mansfield Park: An Essay in Critical Synthesis
Avrom Fleishman
University of Minnesota Press, 1967
A Reading of Mansfield Park was first published in 1967.Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park has been examined in a number of scholarly contexts and has been vigorously debated according to divergent ethical and political views. In this new study of the work, Professor Fleishman provides a full and unified reading of the novel by employing methods and synthesizing insights drawn from several fields of knowledge - history and sociology, psychology, and cultural anthropology. By combining several perspectives within a single study, he attempts to avoid the pitfalls of partial readings.After an introductory discussion of his method in relation to current trends in literary criticism, the author reviews past criticism of Mansfield Park. In the chapters which follow he discusses the novel’s historical background and its response to social, political, and economic issues of the day; the psychological structure of the characters and its bearing on an ethical evaluation of them; and the mythological parallels which, he finds, impart a sound framework and universal significance to the plot. In the final chapter he places the work within the tradition of English fiction, in an effort to estimate its enduring value.
Reading Old English: A Primer and First Reader, Revised Edition
ROBERT HASENFRATZ
West Virginia University Press, 2010 With the immersion method dominating contemporary language learning, the knowledge of traditional grammar is at a low ebb, creating real barriers to any student wanting to learning dead or historical languages. This revised edition of Reading Old English aims to equip readers (advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and autodidacts) with the necessary tools to read the oldest recorded forms of the English language by explaining key language features clearly and methodically, without simplifying any of the core grammatical concepts. It includes a number of helpful exercises, a variety of interesting and unusual Old English texts to translate, as well as appendices covering the basics of traditional grammar and sound changes in Old English, along with an introduction to poetic structure.
 Reading on the Middle Border: The Culture of Print in Late-Nineteenth-Century Osage, Iowa
Christine Pawley
University of Massachusetts Press, 2009 Reading is an everyday activity so taken for granted that it seems virtually invisible. In spite of its ubiquity in modern life (or perhaps because of its familiarity), scholars have only recently begun paying attention to its development as a social practice. During the nineteenth century, an evolving print culture made reading an essential part of Americans' daily routines. To date, the history of American reading practices has tended to focus on middle-class white people living in northeastern cities before 1876. Reading on the Middle Border shifts the focus to the Midwest and broadens the base of economic classes studied.
Christine Pawley investigates the use of print by "ordinary" Americans in the small, rural community of Osage, Iowa—the town that shaped Hamlin Garland—analyzing primary source material on education, religious life, a reading club, and business affairs. A major section of her study focuses on the public library, an institution that provides a valuable window into the reading practices of men and women of various ages, classes, ethnicities, and religions. An extensive database of library circulation and accessions information, combined with federal and state census data, sheds light on the elusive issue of "Who read what?"
Pawley explores the ways print confirmed or challenged people's economic, social, and religious world, and asks what values print expressed or confronted. She also raises questions relating to modes and contexts of reading, distinguishing between groups and individuals. The picture of print in Osage is complex and defies reduction, but by placing print in a community context and viewing printed materials as an expression of activities, not mere artifacts, Pawley enhances our understanding of the role of reading in American culture.
 Reading Ovid in Medieval Wales
Paul Russell
Ohio State University Press, 2017 Reading Ovid in Medieval Wales provides the first complete edition and discussion of the earliest surviving fragment of Ovid’s Ars amatoria, or The Art of Love, which derives from ninth-century Wales; the manuscript, which is preserved in Oxford, is heavily glossed mainly in Latin but also in Old Welsh. This study, by Classical and Celtic scholar Paul Russell, discusses the significance of the manuscript for classical studies and how it was absorbed into the classical Ovidian tradition. This volume’s main focus, however, is on the glossing and commentary and what these can teach us about the pedagogical approaches to Ovid’s text in medieval Europe and Britain and, more specifically, in Wales.
Russell argues that this annotated version of the Ars amatoria arose out of the teaching traditions of the Carolingian world and that the annotation, as we have it, was the product of a cumulative process of glossing and commenting on the text. He then surveys other glossed Ovid manuscripts to demonstrate how that accumulation was built up. Russell also explores the fascinating issue of why Ovid’s love poetry should be used to teach Latin verse in monastic contexts. Finally, he discusses the connection between this manuscript and the numerous references to Ovid in later Welsh poetry, suggesting that the Ovidian references should perhaps be taken to refer to love poetry more generically.
 Reading Palestine: Printing and Literacy, 1900-1948
By Ami Ayalon
University of Texas Press, 2004 Prior to the twentieth century, Arab society in Palestine was predominantly illiterate, with most social and political activities conducted through oral communication. There were no printing presses, no book or periodical production, and no written signs in public places. But a groundswell of change rapidly raised the region's literacy rates, a fascinating transformation explored for the first time in Reading Palestine. Addressing an exciting aspect of Middle Eastern history as well as the power of the printed word itself, Reading Palestine describes how this hurried process intensified the role of literacy in every sphere of community life. Ami Ayalon examines Palestine's development of a modern educational system in conjunction with the emergence of a print industry, libraries and reading clubs, and the impact of print media on urban and rural populations. Drawn from extensive archival sources, official reports, autobiographies, and a rich trove of early Palestinian journalism, Reading Palestine provides crucial insight into the dynamic rise of literacy that revolutionized the way Palestinians navigated turbulent political waters.
Reading Patristic Texts on Social Ethics: Issues and Challenges for the Twenty-First Century
Johan Leemans
Catholic University of America Press, 2011 Can writings of the church fathers related to the field of social ethics be of value to contemporary discussions on the topic? In addressing this question, the authors of this book discuss the exciting challenges that scholars of both early Christianity and contemporary Catholic social thought face regarding the interaction of historical sources and present issues.
Reading Paul's Letter to the Romans
Jerry L. Sumney
SBL Press, 2012 In this volume, leading scholars in the study of Romans invite students and nonspecialists to engage this text and thus come to a more complete understanding of both the letter and Paul’s theology. The contributors include interpreters with different understandings of Romans so that readers see a range of interpretations of central issues in the study of the text. Each essay includes a short review of different positions on a topic and an argument for the author’s position, set out in clear, nontechnical terms, making the volume an ideal classroom tool. The contributors are A. Andrew Das, James D. G. Dunn, Victor Paul Furnish, Joel B. Green, A. Katherine Grieb, Caroline Johnson Hodge, L. Ann Jervis, E. Elizabeth Johnson, Sylvia C. Keesmaat, Rodrigo J. Morales, Mark D. Nanos, Jerry L. Sumney, and Francis Watson.
 Reading Philosophy, Writing Poetry: Intertextual Modes of Making Meaning in Early Medieval China
Wendy Swartz
Harvard University Press, 2018 In a formative period of Chinese culture, early medieval writers made extensive use of a diverse set of resources, in which such major philosophical classics as Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Classic of Changes featured prominently. Reading Philosophy, Writing Poetry examines how these writers understood and manipulated a shared intellectual lexicon to produce meaning. Focusing on works by some of the most important and innovative poets of the period, this book explores intertextuality—the transference, adaptation, or rewriting of signs—as a mode of reading and a condition of writing. It illuminates how a text can be seen in its full range of signifying potential within the early medieval constellation of textual connections and cultural signs.
If culture is that which connects its members past, present, and future, then the past becomes an inherited and continually replenished repository of cultural patterns and signs with which the literati maintains an organic and constantly negotiated relationship of give and take. Wendy Swartz explores how early medieval writers in China developed a distinctive mosaic of ways to participate in their cultural heritage by weaving textual strands from a shared and expanding store of literary resources into new patterns and configurations.
 Reading Piers Plowman and the Pilgrim's Progress: Reception and the Protestant Reader
Barbara A. Johnson
Southern Illinois University Press, 1992 Centering her discussion on two historical "ways of reading"—which she calls the Protestant and the lettered—Barbara A. Johnson traces the development of a Protestant readership as it is reflected in the reception of Langland’s Piers Plowman and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Informed by reader-response and reception theory and literacy and cultural studies, Johnson’s ambitious examination of these two ostensibly literary texts charts the cultural roles they played in the centuries following their composition, roles far more important than their modern critical reputations can explain. Johnson argues that much more evidence exists about how earlier readers read than has hitherto been acknowledged. The reception of Piers Plowman, for example, can be inferred from references to the work, the apparatus its Renaissance printer inserted in his editions, the marginal comments readers inscribed both in printed editions and in manuscripts, and the apocryphal "plowman" texts that constitute interpretations of Langland’s poem. She demonstrates by example that what is culturally transmitted has not been just the work itself; it includes vestiges of past readers’ encounters with the text that are traceable both in the way a text is presented as well as in the way that presentation is received. Conditioned more by religious, historical, and economic forces than by literary concerns, Langland’s poem became a part of the reformist tradition that culminated in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. By understanding this tradition, Bunyan’s place in it, and the way the reception of The Pilgrim’s Progress illustrates the beginning of a new, more realistic fictional tradition, Johnson concludes, we can begin to delineate a more accurate history of the ways literature and society intersect, a history of readers reading.
 Reading Places: Literacy, Democracy, and the Public Library in Cold War America
Christine Pawley
University of Massachusetts Press, 2010 This book recounts the history of an experimental regional library service in the early 1950s, a story that has implications far beyond the two Wisconsin counties where it took place. Using interviews and library records, Christine Pawley reveals the choices of ordinary individual readers, showing how local cultures of reading interacted with formal institutions to implement an official literacy policy.
Central to the experiment were well-stocked bookmobiles that brought books to rural districts and the one-room schools that dotted the region. Three years after the project began, state officials and local librarians judged it an overwhelming success. Library circulation figures soared to two-and-a-half times their previous level. Over 90 percent of grade-school children in the rural schools used the bookmobile service, and their reading scores improved beyond expectation.
Despite these successes, however, local communities displayed deeply divided reactions. Some welcomed the book-mobiles and new library services wholeheartedly, valuing print and reading as essential to the exercise of democracy, and keen to widen educational opportunities for children growing up on hardscrabble farms where books and magazines were rare. Others feared the intrusion of govern- ment into their homes and communities, resented the tax increases that library services entailed, and complained about the subversive or immoral nature of some books.
Analyzing the history of tensions between various community groups, Pawley delineates the long-standing antagonisms arising from class, gender, and ethnic differences which contributed to a suspicion of official projects to expand education. Relating a seemingly small story of library policy, she teases out the complex interaction of reading, locality, and cultural difference. In so doing, she illuminates broader questions regarding libraries, literacy, and citizenship, reaching back to the nineteenth century and forward to the present day.
 Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America
Tara A. Bynum
University of Illinois Press, 2023 In the early United States, a Black person committed an act of resistance simply by reading and writing. Yet we overlook that these activities also brought pleasure. Tara A. Bynum tells the compelling stories of four early American writers who expressed feeling good despite living while enslaved or only nominally free. The poet Phillis Wheatley delights in writing letters to a friend. Ministers John Marrant and James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw memorialize their love for God. David Walker’s pamphlets ask Black Americans to claim their victory over slavery. Together, their writings reflect the joyous, if messy, humanity inside each of them. This proof of a thriving interior self in pursuit of good feeling forces us to reckon with the fact that Black lives do matter. A daring assertion of Black people’s humanity, Reading Pleasures reveals how four Black writers experienced positive feelings and analyzes the ways these emotions served creative, political, and racialized ends.
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