Introduction: Women Readers as Literary Figures and Cultural Icons

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. Illustrations vii
4. Acknowledgments ix
5. Introduction: Women Readers as Literary Figures and Cultural Icons 1
6. 1. Reading Women/Reading Pictures: Textual and Visual Reading in Charlotte Brontë's Fiction and Nineteenth-Century Painting 27
7. 2. 'Success Is Sympathy': Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Woman Reader 53
8. 3. Reading Mind, Reading Body: Augusta Jane Evans's Beulah and the Physiology of Reading 77
9. 4. 'I Should No More Think of Dictating ... What Kinds of Books She Should Read': Images of Women Readers in Victorian Family Literary Magazines 105
10. 5. The Reading Habit and 'The Yellow Wallpaper' 129
11. 6. Social Reading, Social Work, and the Social Function of Literacy in Louisa May Alcott's 'May Flowers' 149
12. 7. 'A Thought in the Huge Bald Forehead': Depictions of Women in the British Museum Reading Room, 1857-1929 168
13. 8. 'Luxuriat[ing] in Milton's Syllables': Writer as Reader in Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road 192
14. 9. Poor Lutie's Almanac: Reading and Social Critique in Ann Petry's The Street 215
15. 10. 'One of Those People Like Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath': The Pathologized Woman Reader in Literary and Popular Culture 236
16. 11. The 'Talking Life' of Books: Women Readers in Oprah's Book Club 255
17. Afterword: Women Readers Revisited 281
18. Contributors 295
19. Backmatter 299