Crossing Over: Gendered Reading Formations at the Muncie Public Library, 1891-1902

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Readers are never merely passive recipients of textual messages. One of themost powerful insights of reader-response theory in the 1970s and 1980s is that the meaning of a text never resides entirely within the artifact itself. Commentators from Carlo Ginzberg (“aggressive originality”), to Jauss (“horizon of ex-pectations”), to Fish (“interpretive communities”), and Radway (“Reading is notEating”) have long-since established that readers are creators of meaning.