ABSTRACT
The very act of reading, an individual’s experience and making sense of a text, is an elusive phenomenon, often beyond the grasp of empirical research. One way of gaining critical insight into this practice is to examine textual and artistic testimonies in the form of literary response texts, personal notes and correspondence, reviews, critical examinations, illustrations and similar material. Cook and Seager point out that in eighteenth-century literary and publishing practices “imitative writing was as valuable (in every sense) as ‘original’ work”. As Genette explains, transvaluation involves two interpretative processes: devaluation and (counter)valuation; that is, as some of the aspects of the hypotext’s original value system are minimised, the hypertext puts emphasis elsewhere, thus promoting a different set of values, which may but does not have to become a form of counter-writing. While serious reservations have been voiced against national reception studies, with doubts expressed as to whether such investigations provide any insight into the source text at all.
