Why do literary theorists see reading as an act of dispassionate textual analysis and meaning production, when historical evidence shows that readers have often read excessively, obsessively, and for sensory stimulation? Posing these and other questions, this is the first major work to bring insights from book history to bear on literary history and theory. In so doing, the book charts a compelling and innovative history of theories of reading.

List of Illustrations. Acknowledgements. Introduction: Anatomy of Reading. (Books; Bibliomania; Bodies). 1. A History of Reading. (From Reading Aloud to Reading Silently; From Monastic to Scholastic Reading; Reading in Solitude; From Intensive to Extensive Reading). 2. The Material Conditions of Reading. (Expressive Function of Print; Instability of the Textual Object; Histories of Textual Transmission; From Manuscript to Typographic Culture; from Print to Hypermedia Culture). 3. The Physiology of Consumption. (Side-effects of Reading; Reading-Fever; Reading Addiction; Modernity and the Assault on the Senses; Eye-Strain and Eye-Hunger; Film-Fever; Dazzling the Audience; Dizzy in Hyperspace; (Dis)Embodied in Cyberspace; Passive Consumers). 4. The Reader in Fiction. (Dangers of Reading; The Tearful Reader; The Frightened Reader; The Passionate Reader; Pathology of Reading; Reading Games; The Danger of a Future without Books; Multisensory Media). 5. The Role of Affect in Literary Criticism. (Reading with/out Pathos; Docere-Delectare-Movere; From Reader to Author to Text; Disinterested and Contemplative Reading; Close Reading; Reading for Sense rather than Sensation). 6. The Reader in Theory. (Un/Readability; A Priori Conditions of Reading; Controlling Readers' Responses; Reading Expectations; Conventions of Reading; Interpretive Communities; Failure of Reading; Misreading; The Reader as Writer; The Politics of Difference). 7. Sexual Politics of Reading. (The Resisting Reader; Black Women Readers; Empirical Audiences; Active Consumers; "Low-/Middle-/Highbrow" Reading; Embodied Reading; Reading as/like a Woman; The Feminisation of the Reader). Conclusion: Materialist Readings. Notes. References and Bibliography. Index