Reading It Wrong

""[A] sharp study. . . . The thorough research—drawn largely from margin annotations, letters, and journals—impresses, illuminating the dynamic ways an expanding readership made sense of Augustan literature. English scholars will find much to ponder."" * Publishers Weekly * ""Reading It Wrong sounds like a book reviewer’s nightmare, but I’ve come to trust the scholar Abigail Williams. . . . By examining letters, diaries and marginalia, Williams demonstrates that those original ‘imperfect readers’ were awash in ‘a particularly acute sense of puzzlement and confusion.’ But this bafflement wasn’t a bug; it was a feature of dynamic and interactive works of literature.""---Ron Charles, Washington Post ""[Reading It Wrong] can be read with profit and pleasure—especially on account of the original archival research."" * Choice Reviews * ""[A] brilliantly astute and deeply learned alternative history of early eighteenth-century English literature.""---Paul Sabor, Voltaire Foundation ""[A] fine history of readerly misprision.""---Thomas Keymer, London Review of Books ""[Reading It Wrong] presents. . . a new framework for considering eighteenth-century literature. . . . Compelling.""---LuElla D'Amico, Current ""A really important book, Reading it Wrong should be THE introductory book assigned to every student of the 18th century, and required reading for all those scholars who have based so much on the quicksand of a false premise.""---Cliff Cunningham, Sun News Austin ""Thoughtful, well-researched, and ambitious.""---Melanie Holm, Eighteenth-Century Fiction ""An original and empirically based account of the early eighteenth century’s culture of textual interpretation. . . . If it is not primarily our historical distance that makes these texts difficult to penetrate, then perhaps the confusion that typifies students’ encounters with this corpus, often experienced as a barrier, can be reframed as a source of knowledge, or even connection with the past. The upshot of such a reconfiguration of expectations for today’s readers is powerful, especially when explicated and authorized by one of the field’s foremost scholarly voices.""---Alexis Chema, Modern Philology ""The clarity, erudition, and accessibility of Reading It Wrong will delight and illuminate. . . . [this book] is a pleasure to read.""---Rebecca Anne Barr, English: Journal of the English Association ""[A] sharp study. . . . The thorough research—drawn largely from margin annotations, letters, and journals—impresses, illuminating the dynamic ways an expanding readership made sense of Augustan literature. English scholars will find much to ponder."" * Publishers Weekly * ""Reading It Wrong sounds like a book reviewer’s nightmare, but I’ve come to trust the scholar Abigail Williams. . . . By examining letters, diaries and marginalia, Williams demonstrates that those original ‘imperfect readers’ were awash in ‘a particularly acute sense of puzzlement and confusion.’ But this bafflement wasn’t a bug; it was a feature of dynamic and interactive works of literature.""---Ron Charles, Washington Post ""[Reading It Wrong] can be read with profit and pleasure—especially on account of the original archival research."" * Choice Reviews * ""[A] brilliantly astute and deeply learned alternative history of early eighteenth-century English literature.""---Paul Sabor, Voltaire Foundation ""[A] fine history of readerly misprision.""---Thomas Keymer, London Review of Books ""[Reading It Wrong] presents. . . a new framework for considering eighteenth-century literature. . . . Compelling.""---LuElla D'Amico, Current ""A really important book, Reading it Wrong should be THE introductory book assigned to every student of the 18th century, and required reading for all those scholars who have based so much on the quicksand of a false premise.""---Cliff Cunningham, Sun News Austin ""Thoughtful, well-researched, and ambitious.""---Melanie Holm, Eighteenth-Century Fiction ""An original and empirically based account of the early eighteenth century’s culture of textual interpretation. . . . If it is not primarily our historical distance that makes these texts difficult to penetrate, then perhaps the confusion that typifies students’ encounters with this corpus, often experienced as a barrier, can be reframed as a source of knowledge, or even connection with the past. The upshot of such a reconfiguration of expectations for today’s readers is powerful, especially when explicated and authorized by one of the field’s foremost scholarly voices.""---Alexis Chema, Modern Philology ""The clarity, erudition, and accessibility of Reading It Wrong will delight and illuminate. . . . [this book] is a pleasure to read.""---Rebecca Anne Barr, English: Journal of the English Association