ABSTRACT
Jonathan Rose is right to insist on the intertextual and intergeneric nature of the reading experience. A single woman living in 'rooms' in town and taking the Underground to work could spend some of her disposable income on easily available reading material that she wouldn't dare bring home to her parents. The rise of literary purism in the 1890s emerges through this reading less as an aesthetic than as a social response. Equally, in ignoring the social spaces in which reading and book buying took place, Peter D. McDonald's version is also stripped of the ideologies of public and private that are so crucial in terms of gender. The publication of the Revised Old Testament five years later, though a success in publishing terms, was a much less spectacular event. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
