What does it mean to be a reader of a novel? he famous scene of Anna Karenina reading on the train takes up this question. Whereas Tolstoy's scene is traditionally viewed as yet another example of the pleasures and dangers of novel reading, from empathic identiication to romantic self-aestheticization, I argue that the scene investigates the phenomenology of novel reading, the nature of readerly subjectivity, and the poetics of the classic realist novel—all in ways that depart from other canonical literary depictions of novel reading. Bringing together the poetics of the realist novel with complex issues of selfknowledge and deliberation, the scene reveals a new form of readerly subjectivity that entails the imagined nonexistence of the empirical reader. Drawing on Bakhtin, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and others, I show the implications of this form of readerly subjectivity for not only an original interpretation of Tolstoy's much-read scene but also our understanding of novel reading.

The self-improvement industry has been analyzed from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including those of sociology, history, and religion, but its relation to literature has not received the attention it demands. Self-help is inextricable from the history and future of reading around the globe. Using Samuel Smiles's Self-Help (1859) as a case study, I unearth the overlooked role of the self-help hermeneutic, a practical reading method that collapses period, nation, and genre in the global dissemination of literary culture. I then demonstrate that the pastiche didacticism of Smiles's early readers has become a mainstream conceit of twenty-first-century novels, including Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, Tash Aw's Five Star Billionaire, and Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be?. By putting on hold the standard critique of the genre's homogeneous neoliberal influence, I recalibrate the scales by which we measure self-help's literary and political relevance.

Cora Wilson Stewart's Country Life Readers (1915-17), beginning reading primers designed for white Appalachian adults, contain lessons in the social meaning of reading. he formal interplay of the readers’ illustrations, text, and handwriting exercises show how Stewart's primers teach not how to read but rather how to act like a reader. By instructing students in the habits, attitudes, and behaviors that will make them seem “literate” to the wider world, the primers argue that these performances (some textual, many not) are not supplements to literacy but literacy itself. Setting Stewart's primers against other adult primers from the period further shows how these literate performances were circumscribed by race and region. Rather than dismiss this version of literacy as irredeemably “mythic,” I suggest that sources like Stewart's are evocative reminders to attend to the ways in which nonreading is always implicated in reading's meaning.

How might scholars extrapolate from the material evidence of “used books” to build larger narratives that help us make sense of the past, without reducing it again to grand, progressivist theories? The history of reading, and book history more generally, would benefit from an exploration of frameworks that extend beyond those of linear time and discrete periodization, and media and technology studies might help lead the way. his essay juxtaposes two annotations left in a set of cut-and-paste biblical harmonies made at the religious household of Little Gidding in the 1630s and 1640s. The first is a seventeenth-century note left by King Charles I; the second is a cut-up booklet made by an anonymous reader in the nineteenth century. Comparing these two moments of reading reveals the urgency of expanding the historical horizons of literary studies and deepening its engagement with theories of time, media, and materiality.

The history of Edna St. Vincent Millay's long World War II propaganda poem he Murder of Lidice reveals the transmedial logics that affected its publication and the media conditions that shaped its reception. After commissioning the poem in 1942, the Writers’ War Board coordinated a high-profile, strategically sequenced release, in which eight versions of the poem went public during a single week—periodical versions in he Saturday Review of Literature and Life magazine, a live performance featuring Hollywood actors, an NBC radio broadcast of that live performance, globally broadcast radio versions in three languages, and a book issued by Harper and Brothers. Comparing a set of fan letters (written in response to the NBC and Life versions) with a collection of interleaved book versions of the poem (books with newspaper articles stored between their pages) suggests how audiences might have been moved by the media of Murder's distribution as much as by the content of the poem itself.

In 1922 Nella Larsen Imes was the first African American applicant accepted to the library school of the New York Public Library; soon she would be a promising novelist of the Harlem Renaissance. Larsen's library school application is a rich text that discloses the encounter of a conflicted subject with the norms and values of an institution. Bureaucratic forms do not have readers—at least as literature professors generally use that word—but filling out an application requires cultural competence, and evaluating one requires interpretive activity. Responding to a standard question on the application, Larsen compiled a book list that reflects her pragmatic, aesthetic, and emotional investment in reading. Stylistically and thematically, this ephemeral document anticipates Larsen's best work; it intimates conflicting perspectives on race, gender, and national belonging while exposing the limits of “imagined community” in one culturally typical American institution.

Reflecting on my experience of teaching British Romantic literature at a Turkish university, this essay addresses the current conversation about global English by exploring the intersections among second-language literary study, translation theory, and Romantic aesthetics. It begins with a reconsideration of orientalism that traces a foreignizing impulse in canonical Romanticism, links this with Victor Shklovsky's concept of ostranenie (“estrangement”), and goes on to propose foreign language study as the exemplary instance of Romantic or Shklovskian aesthetic experience. Turning next to recent accounts, by Emily Apter and others, of Istanbul as the birthplace of “translational transnationalism,” I juxtapose the utopianism of contemporary translation theory with Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poetic ideal of “untranslatableness.” I conclude with a reading of Orhan Pamuk's novel Snow, particularly its homage to Coleridge's “Kubla Khan,” as a meditation on translatability, before briefly revisiting the Turkish Romantic classroom and its global English futurity.

This essay traces the history of ideas behind the critical methods of distant reading and macroanalysis, modes of criticism enabled by the rise of the science, media, and technology of aggregation. I situate these methods in the intellectual shifts marked by the advent of modern polling practices, computational census technologies, post-1945 marketing strategies, and other methods of analyzing an aggregated public. Drawing on work by Sarah E. Igo, Mary Poovey, Bill Kovarik, and others, I demonstrate that the ideas legitimated through these shifts in technology and public sentiment are fundamental to the types of claims made in the “big data” digital humanities. This attention to intellectual history raises important problems and qualifications for big data methods like distant reading, particularly regarding their underlying assumptions about the publics of literary history.

The concept “cultures of reading” should be expanded to include machines that read. Machine reading is exemplified by the computer system called Never-Ending Language Learning (NELL). Because NELL lacks real-world experience, its semantic comprehension is limited to forming categories of words. This process illustrates a major difference between human and machine reading: whereas human reading involves causal reasoning, machine reading relies more on correlations. Human-machine hybrid reading, for example the kind done with an e-book, can be understood as a cognitive assemblage through which information, interpretations, and meanings circulate. The introduction of mechanical cognition into printing can be seen in the Paige Compositor, from 1878. The transition from electromechanical cognition to more flexible digital and electronic computational media marks the movement from print, understood as a technology involving the arrangement of type pieces to impress ink on paper, to postprint, in which inked products originate as computer files. This change, which signals an ontological rupture in writing and reading practices, is addressed through a cognitive-assemblage approach emphasizing the distribution of cognition among technical and human actors.

“That Book's been Read,” the Poet Susan Howe said this about a copy—my copy—of her book, that this, it has been mauled, spine not quite broken but on the verge, phrases scored under and over, words circled, passages marked with vertical lines, gnarled questions to myself from myself in handwriting only I can read. Program leaflets scrawled with notes are tucked between the endpaper and the back cover and transparent sticky tabs peak up over the top and out from the sides. The only thing I won't do is turn down the corner of a page. Everything else is fair game and the more I care about a book, the more abuse it gets. Fortunately Howe understands.

I find myself returning to the theme of reading against noise and reimagining it as something more like reading up against noise, in which noise is a foe or fiend, something one is up against: not only a challenge, close and insistent, that presents itself whenever one takes up a text (the literal noise that invades one's chair or couch, the ads in the margins of an e-book or a Web page, the wandering thoughts or obligations that draw one away), but also a challenge that is spatially there—up against one's ears and body, encroaching on the very space of one's reading. To read, in this sense, is thus inevitably to come up against noise, to attempt to overcome it–and yet to keep it, as part of the very act of reading, within reach.

What time is it when we read? There are many answers to this question. Time might refer to a particular day of the week, as in Sunday reading, a practice that Christina Lupton finds has spanned both religious and secular contexts. Or time might imply a sense of pace, that reading is something we do quickly or slowly, which Rolf Engelsing suggests when he distinguishes between intensive and extensive reading. Or perhaps time is more periodic, an argument one finds in Deidre Lynch's work on nineteenth-century habitual reading or Christopher Cannon's work on medieval practices of rereading. Or time could be closer to an idea or topos, as in Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope like idyllic time. Finally, for someone like Gerard Genette the time of reading is fundamentally about anachronism, the nonlinear nature of narrative time.