ABSTRACT
In this chapter I consider a number of approaches in philosophy and literary theory that figure reading is a process that produces the text as read. This is an approach to consumption that maintains that the process of reading fictional texts is itself a form of cultural production. Putting this another way, the meaning of a novel by Thomas Hardy or a short story by Katherine Mansfield, or a poem by T.S. Eliot, cannot be separated from the meanings ascribed to these texts by actual readers who read them. Work on readers in literary theory and criticism is something that has developed over the past 30 to 35 years. Writing in 1980, in an introduction to a collection of essays on the relationship between the reader and the literary text, Susan Suleiman observed how ‘The words reader and audience, once relegated to the status of the unproblematic and obvious, have acceded to a starring role’ (1980: 3).
