The twelve essays in this edited collection examine the experience of reading, from the late medieval period to the twentieth century. Central to the theme of the book is the role of materiality: how the physical object - book, manuscript, libretto - affects the experience of the person reading it.

Introduction, Graham Allen, Carrie Griffin, Mary O'Connell; Chapter 1 The Memory and Impact of Oral Performance: Shaping the Understanding of Late Medieval Readers, John J. Thompson; Chapter 2 Print, Miscellaneity and the Reader in Robert Herrick's Hesperides, Ruth Connolly; Chapter 3 Searching for Spectators: From Istoria to History Painting, Liam Lenihan; Chapter 4 Returning to the Text of Frankenstein, Graham Allen; Chapter 5 'Casualty', Mrs Shelley and Seditious Libel: Cleansing Britain's Most Corrupt Poet of Error, Nora Crook; Chapter 6 Writing Textual Materiality: Charles Clark, his Books and his Bookplate Poem, Carrie Griffin, Mary O'Connell; Chapter 7 Charles Dickens's Readers and the Material Circulation of the Text, Robert McParland; Chapter 8 Victorian Pantomime Libretti and the Reading Audience, Jill A. Sullivan; Chapter 9 Material Modernism and Yeats, Alex Davis; Chapter 10, Alistair McCleery; Chapter 11, Ton van Kalmthout; Chapter 12 Intermediality: Experiencing the Virtual Text, Órla Murphy;