This chapter takes up the volume’s key notion of ‘dialogue’ by comparing – and thus bringing into dialogue – two periploi from the late Hellenistic and the imperial period, the description of the Red Sea in Diodorus’ Bibliotheke 3.38–48 and the island ecphrasis 2.17 in Philostratus’ Imagines. To the volume’s larger themes, the chapter adds the aspects of mediality and reader response. It shows how both texts employ a fairly similar ecphrastic technique characterised by contextualisation, historicisation and narrativisation, in order to afford their readers quite different experiences. The key element is their divergent strategies of mediality: the Bibliotheke is characterised by a marked ‘bookishness’, whereas the Imagines creates a feigned orality. Both strategies have their place in contemporary discourses and contexts. The Bibliotheke situates itself in the late Hellenistic debate on writing and reading history, and particularly in the discourse on the pleasures of reading historiographical texts, while the Imagines is part of a broader trend of enriching texts with structures and elements of oral communication in the imperial period.

Modern scholars have achieved consensus that Frances Burney was writing satire in her novels, acknowledging the range of Burney’s satiric targets and tones, and the merging and submerging of her satire with comedy, irony, melodrama, and sentimentalism. Yet Burney’s contemporary reviewers did not identify Burney as a satirist. In fairness, satire defies easy definition, and the status of satiric fiction when Burney was writing at the end of the eighteenth century was far less secure than at the beginning of the period. Furthermore, satire was gendered as male at the time; women were seen as the targets of satire, not its practitioners. So even when Burney’s reviewers and readers did recognize satiric elements in her work, she was seen as a sentimental novelist, a didactic novelist, a romantic novelist – as anything but a satirist. And Burney did not identify herself as a satirist either. In doing so, Burney was passing – hiding in plain sight as a satirist, defying the conventions of women writers and novelists of her time.

In “Dislocating the Reader,” I use psychoanalytic theory to think about how the language of Toni Morrison’s Beloved works on readers. Placing the text of Beloved into dialogue with Jean Laplanche’s theory of the belated time of trauma enables me to think through the ethical and emotional effects of Beloved’s delayed narrative structure on readers. Visual images from the past lives of the characters intrude into the narrative, without explanation; in confusing the reader, these intrusions convey the distortions of time, thought, and memory that disturb these survivors of slavery’s traumas. The chapter centers on the main character, Sethe. I read the mothering practices of Sethe and of her own slave mother through the lens of historical research on actual slave mothers, who were torn between the demands of the master for their labor and the needs of their babies for their time. Throughout, the chapter attends to the difficulties of writing Beloved, as Morrison herself explained them in interviews: to capture the psychic damages inflicted by slavery on her ex-slave characters Morrison had to invent a new narrative language.

Having explored the representation of obesity in the press from a range of methodological and thematic perspectives in the previous chapters, this final analytical chapter focuses on how such representations are received by readers. This chapter describes the construction and analysis of the reader comments accompanying a sample of articles about obesity published on the most-visited online newspaper in the UK – the MailOnline. By comparing these comments to their corresponding articles, the analysis demonstrates how the readers’ comments tend, in the main, to go further than the articles in the extent to which they stigmatise and shame people with obesity, thereby offering more negative and extreme takes on the obesity-related stories being reported. Yet, at the same time, the analysis also shows the ways in which readers can challenge the original articles and, indeed, other commenters, through comments which offer counter discourses to the dominant shaming ones.

Ovid’s Epistulae ex Ponto 2.8 commemorates the exiled poet’s receipt of a gift of silver images of the Caesars from Rome. This paper argues, with reference to Augustan coinage and Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, that the poem deconstructs Romans’ self-subjugation to imperial iconography and highlights their role in vesting it with power. Through comic deployment of the pathetic fallacy via a naïve narrative persona, Ovid shows how, from a provincial perspective, the emperor's numen might really appear to reside in his image, placing the emperor literally in his subjects’ hands. Pont. 2.8 therefore comments more generally on the interpretive possibilities, social practices, and psychology surrounding Roman imperial images, locating their power in plural, subjective, democratic acts of creative consumption.

In my own chapter, I discuss how Plath came into contact with the many common forms – literary and otherwise – in which we find the second person address. These include instructions such as user guides and recipes; questionnaires and interviews; advertising; letters; poems; and prose fiction. All of these second person functions are utilised by Plath at various points in her work. I provide key examples of these uses and establish the context for the kinds of sources she drew upon. Plath’s formulates a ‘you’ that is fluid and mobile, controlling the reader’s distance from and closeness to the narrators of her poems and fiction.