Reading Sites

Reading Sites explores how social differences condition and shape reader response.

Bringing to the fore a key but long-unexplored issue, this volume extends reader-response theory and unites it with more recent discussions on the ethics of reading to consider how readers from different class, gender, racial, and ethnic positions respond to texts, authors, and other real or imagined readers.

Integrating scholarship from literary studies and composition and rhetoric, Reading Sites examines a host of genres, from nineteenth-century working-class autobiographies and twentieth-century women's confessional magazines to detective fiction and book-club selections, to question how various groups of readers and authors identify with competing social hierarchies.