End-Users and Readers

Abstract

The coordination of economics and aesthetics can be seen in the production of a work, on the supply side of the equation. But what of the demand side, the area that literary studies approach through reception theory and in readings? If economics and aesthetics are pertinent intersecting determinants of novels generally, and of Middlemarch in particular, then how does that intersection take place when Middlemarch is not only purchased but read? Without repeating the ideological universalism of earlier Marxism, or reducing readers either to dupes or fully-empowered interpreters, how would we assemble a method for decoding texts as though, like commodities, their job was to provide satisfaction for private needs? More importantly, how would a commodity reading compare to the extant evidence of what people did with books? Because while some people bought books, others borrowed or were given them. Books were collected, left unread, remaindered for trunk linings or used to line baking dishes. Readers often came across their literature in daily newspapers and in paper used to wrap commodity goods. Not all readers entered into an aesthetic contemplation of the unified text – literature may well have been what distracted readers whilst they should have been busy with something else. Since 1871, readers of published print entitled Middlemarch were engaged both with a literary work of art and a commodity.