Crossing Over: Gendered Reading Formations at the Muncie Public Library, 1891-1902

Abstract

Readers are never merely passive recipients of textual messages. One of the most powerful insights of reader-response theory in the 1970s and 1980s is that the meaning of a text never resides entirely within the artifact itself. Commentators from Carlo Ginzberg ("aggressive originality"), to Jauss ("horizon of expectations"), to Fish ("interpretive communities"), and Radway ("Reading is not Eating") have long-since established that readers are creators of meaning. To quote Tony Bennett, meaning "is not a thing that texts can have, but is something that can only be produced, and always differently, within the reading formations that regulate the encounters between texts and readers." Yet even as it challenges the very idea that texts exist independently of readers and their institutional and social contexts, Bennett's concept of a "reading formation" also reminds us that there are socio-historically determined limits to creative appropriation. For Bennett, text, context, and reader constitute an inseparable unity; every reading situation is shaped by "discursive and intertextual determinations that organize and animate the practice of reading. . . ." A rich and nuanced account of the complex balance between social determination and autonomy therefore requires a combination of methods, both a consideration of textual features and investigation of book-historical, ideological, institutional, and social pressures.

The Social Lives of Books: Reading Victorian Literature on Goodreads

“…As Tatlock et al have argued in an article analysing data on library patrons in Muncie, Indiana, from 1891 to 1902, computational methods may be especially suited to "investigations of reader agency"; such "quantitative analyses of reader behavior" may allow us "to enhance our understanding of how meaning is co-constructed." 3 In this paper, following scholarship in the reception history of literature, we compare social media traces from Goodreads to data from the MLA International Bibliography and the Open Syllabus Project, in order to better understand the preferences of readers of Victorian literature from different but overlapping communities. We find that the majority of works of Victorian literature that are indicated as being read on Goodreads occur about as often as they are taught or written about in the academy, although books aimed at an adult audience are written about more frequently in peer-reviewed venues.…”