Contents

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations of Titles

Part I

Chapter 1. Writing the Reader

Four Approaches to Reading

The Significance of the Quixotic Reader’s Gender

The Quixotic Plot

Self-Reflexivity Revisited

Chapter 2. The Reader in the Text: Dramatizing Literary Communication

The Projection of Reading Stances

Narratorial Commentary and the Performance of Authorship

Part II

Chapter 3. The Ambivalent Rise of the Novel Reader: Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote

Novel, Romance, and Reading around 1750

Sex, Violence, and Arabella: Debating the Physical Impact of Reading

Models of Virtue? Lennox and Johnson

Great Expectations? Reading as a Socially Embedded Practice

Probing Problems of Authority and Instruction

Chapter 4. The Institutionalization of Novel Reading: Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey

The Uses of Parody: Restructuring the Quixotic Plot

Catherine Morland and the Politics of the Didactic

Reading and the Channelling of Emotions

Consumerism and Communities of Taste

Reconsidering the Defense of the Novel

Chapter 5. Psychologizing Reading as Social Behaviour: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife

Reading as a Bad Habit: Idleness and Licentiousness

Isabel Sleaford and Emma Bovary

Young Isabel and Reading as Compensation

Isabel and Roland: The Temptations of Companionship

Intertextuality Reloaded

Sigismund Smith: Sensation Fiction and the Pleasures of Reading

Part III

Chapter 6. Looking Forward, Looking Back: Novel Reading in the Twenty-First Century

Chapter 7. Taking Stock of the Novel Reader’s History: Ian McEwan’s Atonement

Briony as a Quixotic Reader/Writer and the Problem of Cognition

Achieving Atonement? Briony’s Ethics of Storytelling

Narrative Situation(s) and the Ethics of Form

Atonement as Homage and Challenge to the History of the Novel

Cecilia and Robbie: The Sacralization of Reading

Chapter 8. The Nostalgic Future of Novel Reading: Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader

The Quixote in Reverse

Common and Uncommon Readers

From the London Review of Books to the Internet: Medial Environments and Reading as Cultural Affiliation

Emphasizing Medial Difference: The Uncommon Reader and Stephen Frears’s The Queen

Concluding Remarks

Works Cited

Index of Names