Abstract
"The Reader as Author" explores how readers become co-authors of the literary experience, through the imaginative act of filling gaps or, indeed, through their resistance to authorial propositions. The “virtual witnessing” in Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle and the companionable tone of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books—testify to the broad range of literary genres that invite readers to interact with and react to “author” texts beyond the initial writer’s control.
Highlights
Contributor: Dame Gillian Beer is King Edward VII Professor Emeritus at the University of Cambridge and a former President of Clare Hall
Human authors are much more like Satan than God: they can start things but not control consequences
We each import landscapes from our own particular repertoire of places; we endow the characters with faces and bodies from the range of our particular awareness – and all this despite, or alongside, any indications offered by the author
Summary
It is the case that many readers come to novels by means of film so that the scenery and faces with which their reading is informed have already been defined by others, rather than generated out of their own memories. The reader is multiplied; the person generated by differing texts through the same pair of eyes is not identical.
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