Includes index.

Print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

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.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 234-253) and index.

The history of the novel is also a history of shifting views of the value of novel reading. This study investigates how novels themselves participate in this development by featuring reading as a multidimensional cultural practice. English novels about obsessive reading, written in times of medial transition, serve as test cases for a model that brings together analyses of form and content.

Open Access EbpS