Readers and Reading in America: Historical and Critical Perspectives.

Surveys the state of scholarship in the United States on the history of reading, exploring work on six particular topics: reading as an aspect of intellectual history, as an aspect of popular culture, as represented in texts, gender and reading, the reader as appropriator, and the question of whether there was a "reading revolution" sometime during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The two dominant themes of this scholarship focus on the history of the book and literary studies concerned with authorship.