Description: This session, for those invested in the theory, history, and practice of reading, asks, Does reading really have a history? If so, does it move in a straight line, successive phases demarcated by periods? Or how does reading’s history move? How are we to read it? We invite nineteenth-century specialists to read backward and eighteenth-century specialists to read forward, thus testing the limits of historicist reading and the durability of specific reading praxes and literary tropologies.

Presiders

Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, U of California, Irvine

Daniel Akiva Novak, U of Alabama, Tuscaloosa

Speakers

Talia Schaffer, Graduate Center, City U of New York

Devoney Looser, Arizona State U

John M. G. Plotz, Brandeis U

Monique Allewaert, U of Wisconsin, Madison

Dennis Denisoff, U of Tulsa

Thomas Salem Manganaro, U of Richmond