ABSTRACT
And so finally to the punters: in other words to you, the readers. I want to start this discussion of readerly power with two assessments: one forty years old, the other more recent. Both focus on West Africa, both address the phenomenon of a ‘reading culture’, and both – so it seems to me – illustrate just how deeply the assumptions of Euro-American book history and criticism have sunk into the minds of commentators on literary reception in the wider world, sometimes at the very points at which they seem most determined to resist them.
