ABSTRACT
The myriad individual encounters between English consumers and Scottish books upon which this increasing intimacy at the developing heart of a new British culture was founded, however, were demonstrably diverse. Indeed, from the disparate evidence at which people have now looked, the experience of reading clearly took a great many forms, differing widely from person to person and from occasion to occasion. Appropriation, by extension, is merely the set of processes by which the reader-as-recipient actualises or, to return once again to Wolfgang Iser’s term, ‘realises,’ some of those meanings. The crucial point is that the justifiable emphasis upon context in the mind of the historian now becomes less an argument for investigating the original performance of the text’s creator. In short, reading aided the construction of some of those different social identities that collectively constituted their personality—a fact that further underlines the merit in the cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s observation in The Interpretation of Cultures.
