ABSTRACT
Book history, The Chronicle of Higher Education recently noted, has tapped into some of the biggest shifts in the humanities of the last 30 years, one of the most profound shifts being a recognition that readers are as important to literature as writers (Winkler, 1993, p. A7). Cathy Davidson rightly remarks that to understand how readers have responded to given texts in historical periods requires the most dextrous kind of scholarship; a scholarship that is at home in the territories of the intellectual historian as well as the literary theorist, a scholarship firmly rooted in the details of publishing history but innovative enough to raise speculative questions about the private and communal interactions between texts and readers (1988, p. 7).
