Table of Contents

Introduction: Women Readers as Literary Fixtures and Cultural Icons Janet Badia and Jennifer Phegley1. Reading Women/Reading Pictures: Textual and Visual reading in Charlotte Bronte's Novels and Nineteenth-Century Paintings Antonia Losano2. 'Success is Sympathy': Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Woman Reader Elizabeth Fekete Trubey3. Reading Mind, Reading Body: Augusta Jane Evans' Beulah and the Physiology of Reading Suzanne M Ashworth4. 'I Should No More Think of Dictating...What Kinds of Books She Should Read': Images of Women readers in Literary Magazines Jennifer Phegley5. The Reading Habit and 'The Yellow Wallpaper' Barbara Hochman6. Societal Reading, Social Work, and the Function of Literacy in Louisa May Alcott's 'May Flowers' Sarah A. Wadsworth7. 'A Thought in the huge Bald Forehead': Depictions of Women in the British Museum Reading Room 1857-1929 Ruth Hoberman8. 'Luxuriating in Milton's Syllables': Writer as Reader in Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road Tuire Valkeakari 9. Poor Lutie's Almanac: Reading and Social Critique in Ann Petry's The Street Michele Crescenzo10. 'One of Those People Like Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath': The pathologized Woman Reader in Literary Popular Culture Janet Badia11. The 'Talking Life' of Books: Constructing Women Readers in Oprah's Book Club Mary R. LambAfterward: Women Readers Revisited Kate Flint

About the Author

Janet Badia is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Marshall University.

Jennifer Phegley is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.