Afterword

Abstract

The afterward briefly summarizes the key arguments of this book: that formation does not end at any one privileged moment, but, rather, that readers help bring form into being; and that the history of form and that of readers is thus intertwined. It then brings this argument to bear upon the House of Fame. It suggests that, drawing upon the afterlife as it is depicted in Dante’s Commedia, Fame’s domain depicts a synchronic realm of reception located outside of any one reader’s temporal experience. Yet this world soon dissolves back into diachronic time and the history of lived acts of reading.