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Littau, Karin. Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies and Bibliomania. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006. xi + 194 pp. £55.00 (hardback), £17.99 (paperback). ISBN 0–7456–1659–3/1658–5, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 43, Issue 4, October 2007, Page 476, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqm092
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Extract
Although this book cannot be called a “reader” of current theories of reading, it offers a useful survey of how reading since the advent of the printing press has been to do not only with intellectual, disembodied responses – as theorists would have it – but also with embodied ones. An investigation of histories of high and popular print culture by comparison with newer media, and of reader response theory, close reading, and cultural studies approaches highlighting class, race or gender of readers, only reveals the same story, namely that the materiality of the readerly body is everywhere downplayed. This book therefore marks an important step in challenging “high” theory (and not only theories of reading) to reprioritise matter, not least by its foregrounding of work instigated by feminist approaches and theorists such as Hélène Cixous. However, it leaves the well-read reader rather hungry when it comes to a thoroughgoing analysis of, or agendas for, what an embodied theory of reading and readers might entail.
