Reading in Groups: An Introduction

The essays in this issue were the result of a panel held at the November 2005 MMLA. Organized by Philip Goldstein, the three panelists addressed the topic and/as Reception Study: On Reading by Elizabeth Flynn and Patsy Schweickart. Phil served as moderator and panelist, while Temma Berg and Cecilia Konchar Farr along with her student Rebecca Kurtzahn-Beach also presented papers, and Patsy served as discussant. We thought the papers raised important and controversial issues which deserved further discussion and wondered if READER would be the appropriate forum for such a continuation of our dialogue. Since Temma would be on sabbatical during the Spring, she volunteered to contact Paul Kameen and Mariolina Salvatori and serve as guest editor should the issue be accepted. When she contacted Paul and Mariolina, they enthusiastically welcomed our proposal and we were on our way. Although Katherine Scheil's paper on nineteenth-century reading groups of Shakespeare was not part of the original panel, it was part of the conference and was presented at a Women's Studies session endued Exteriorizing Women. When I heard it, I was immediately impressed with its relevance to the issues raised by our panel. I took her name and email address, hoping that the other Reading panel members would be as happy to include her paper as I was. They were, so now we were five. Even more a group project because of the change of editors, this issue of READER has benefited not only from the advocacy of Paul and Mariolina, but also from the enthusiastic and meticulous editing of Pat Donahue, Lafayette College, who now serves as READER'S editor. We thank all three for their support of our project. The four articles are arranged chronologically. In succession, we learn about eighteenth-century English reading practices, nineteenth-century Shakespeare reading clubs in the United States, Oprah's Book Club, and Sara Paretsky's ad hoc fan club. Covering a wide range of time and ideological spacefrom trivialization of women readers to reading as transgression, from cultural democracy to forceful political critique of the United States- we end with an emphasis on the ongoing dialectical exchange between academic discourse and collective book club reading practices. Arguing in Eighteenth-Century Reading Sites that eighteenth-century English women were sophisticated readers who used the novels of their day to examine, negotiate, and shape their worlds, Berg agrees with Jane Greer and Anne Berggren, two contributors to Reading Sites, that we need to know more about the reading practices of women throughout history. The more we learn about women readers from the past, the more we learn about their proclivity for reading against the grain and for engaging in critical reflection as they indulged their reading habit. Although Berg focuses on one young woman named Sylvia Brathwaite, she contends that many women of Brathwaite's era (and of other eras) were as astute and analytical as she was. Rather than view Sylvia as a sentimental reader of trivial romances, Berg argues that she was a serious reader engaged in exploring and reforming her world. Challenging the negative and short-sighted views of eighteenth-century professional critics, social commentators, and conduct book writers readers like Sylvia present us with an alternative and complex image of Georgian women interrogating and questioning the limits and constraints of their world. Women have always used fictions of all kinds as sites for resistance. Although we tend to picture readers as sitting alone in closets or in studies or by firesides, reading in groups has a long and complex history. Both Katherine Scheil and Cecilia Konchar Farr, along with her student Rebecca Kurtzahn-Beach, believe that we need to know much more about reading in groups. Delving into the archives of a number of cities across the United States, Katherine unearthed much information about the ways nineteenth-century US women used reading groups to educate themselves. …