This article first discusses ‘the reader’ as generally conceived within literary studies (including stylistics), grounding its claims with an empirical analysis of articles published in Language and Literature from 2004 to 2008. It then surveys the many ways in which real readers have been empirically investigated within cultural studies, the history of reading, and cultural sociology. Lastly, it introduces the remaining papers in this special issue as contributions to the study of language and literature.
Absillis, K. ( 2009) ‘ "Folk Stylistics" and the History of Reading: A Discussion of Method’, Language and Literature18(3): 231-46.
2.
Allington, D. ( 2007) ‘ "How Come Most People Don’t See It?": Slashing The Lord of the Rings’, Social Semiotics17(1): 45-64.
3.
Allington, D. and Benwell, B. ( 2007) ‘ "I Almost Was Crying": A Discourse Analytical Approach to Analysing Reception’, paper presented at Beyond the Book, University of Birmingham, 1 September.
4.
Altick, R.D. ( 1963 [1957]) The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
5.
Barrell, J. ( 1988) Poetry, Language, and Politics. Manchester : Manchester University Press.
6.
Barthes, R. ( 1997 [1967]) ‘The Death of the Author’ , in Roland Barthes Image, Music, Text (trans. Stephen Heath) , pp. 142-8. London: Fontana Press.
7.
Benwell, B. ( 2005) ‘ "Lucky This Is Anonymous": Ethnographies of Reception in Men’s Magazines’, Discourse and Society16(2): 147-72.
8.
Benwell, B. ( 2009) ‘ "A Pathetic and Racist and Awful Character": Ethnomethodological Approaches to the Reception of Diasporic Fiction’, Language and Literature18(3): 300-16.
9.
Bortolussi, M. and Dixon, P. ( 1996) ‘The Effects of Formal Training on Literary Reception’ , Poetics23(6): 471-87.
10.
Bourdieu, P. ( 1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (trans. Richard Nice). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
11.
Bourdieu, P. ( 1993) The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature , (trans. and ed. Randal Johnson). Cambridge: Polity Press.
12.
Bourdieu, P. ( 1996) The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (trans. Susan Emanuel). Cambridge: Polity Press.
13.
Bukodi, E. ( 2007) ‘Social Stratification and Cultural Consumption in Hungary: Book Readership’, Poetics35 (2-3): 112-31.
14.
Cavallo, G. and Chartier, R. (eds) (1999) A History of Reading in the West. Cambridge: Polity.
15.
Childs, P. ( 1999) The Twentieth Century in Poetry: A Critical Survey. London and New York: Routledge .
16.
Crone, R. ( 2008) ‘The Common Reader’, History Today58(1): 42-3.
17.
Culler, J. ( 2001a) The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Routledge Classics. London/New York : Routledge.
18.
Culler, J. ( 2001b) ‘Preface to the Routledge Classics Edition’ , in Jonathan Culler The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction, pp. xiii-xxiii. London/New York : Routledge.
19.
Dorfman, M.H. ( 1996) ‘Evaluating the Interpretive Community: Evidence from Expert and Novice Readers’, Poetics23(6): 453-70.
20.
Eriksson, K. ( 2002a) Life and Fiction: On Intertextuality in Pupils’ Booktalk. Linköping: Linköping University Press.
21.
Eriksson, K. ( 2002b) ‘Booktalk Dilemmas: Teachers’ Organisation of Pupils’ Reading’, Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research46(4): 391-408.
22.
Eriksson, K. and Aronsson, K. ( 2004) ‘Building Life World Connections during School Booktalk’ , Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research48(5): 511-28.
23.
Eriksson, K. and Aronsson, K. ( 2005) ‘ "We’re Really Lucky": Co-creating "Us" and the "Other" in School Booktalk’, Discourse & Society16(5): 719-38.
24.
Eriksson Barajas, K. and Aronsson, K. ( 2009) ‘Avid Versus Struggling Readers: Co-construed Pupil Identities in School Booktalk’, Language and Literature18(3): 281-300.
25.
Fetterley, J. ( 1978) The Resisting Reader. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
26.
Fish, S.E. ( 1971) Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost. Berkeley: University of California Press.
27.
Hall, G. ( 2008) ‘Empirical Research into the Processing of Free Indirect Discourse and the Imperative of Ecological Validity’, in Sonia Zyngier, Marisa Bortolussi, Anna Chesnokova and Jan Auracher (eds) Directions in Empirical Literary Studies, pp. 21-34. Amsterdam: John Benjamins .
28.
Hall, G. (2009) ‘Texts, Readers - and Real Readers’, Language and Literature18(3): 331-37.
29.
Hall, S. ( 1980 [1974]) ‘Encoding/Decoding’, in Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis (eds) Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-79, pp. 128-38. London : Hutchinson.
30.
Halsey, K. ( 2008) ‘Reading the Evidence of Reading: An Introduction to the Reading Experience Database 1450-1945’, Journal of Popular Narrative Media1(2): 123-37.
31.
Halsey, K. ( 2009) ‘ "Folk Stylistics" and the History of Reading: A Discussion of Method’, Language and Literature18(3): 231-46.
32.
Hanauer, D.I. ( 2001) ‘What We Know about Reading Poetry: Theoretical Positions and Empirical Research’, in Dick Schram and Gerard Steen (eds) The Psychology and Sociology of Literature: In Honour of Elrud Ibsch, pp. 107-28. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co.
33.
Hermes, J. ( 1995) Reading Women’s Magazines: An Analysis of Everyday Media Use. Cambridge: Polity Press .
34.
Hobson, D. ( 1982) Crossroads: The Drama of a Soap Opera. London: Methuen.
35.
Iser, W. ( 1978) The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
36.
Jakobson, J. ( 1960) ‘Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics’ , in T. A. Sebeok (ed.) Style in Language, pp. 350-77. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
37.
Jauss, H.R. ( 1982) Toward an Ethic of Reception (trans. Timothy Bahti). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
38.
Kim, S. ( 2004) ‘Rereading David Morley’s "The ‘Nationwide’ Audience" ’, Cultural Studies18(1): 84-108.
39.
Lang, A. ( 2009) ‘Reading Race in Small Island: Discourse Deviation, Schemata, and the Textual Encounter’, Language and Literature18(3): 316-31.
40.
Long, E. ( 1986) ‘Women, Reading, and Authority: Some Implications of the Audience Perspective in Cultural Studies’, American Quarterly38: 591-612.
41.
Long, E. ( 1992) ‘Textual Interpretation as Collective Action’ , in Jonathan Boyarin (ed.) The Ethnography of Reading, pp. 180-211. Berkeley: University of California Press.
42.
Lyons, M. and Taksa, L. ( 1992) Australian Readers Remember: An Oral History of Reading, 1890-1930. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
43.
McGann, J.J. ( 1985) The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and TheoryOxford/ New York: Oxford University Press.
44.
Martindale, C. ( 2001) ‘The Proper Place of Humanism: Qualitative versus Scientific Studies of Literature’, in Dick Schram and Gerard Steen (eds) The Psychology and Sociology of Literature: In Honour of Elrud Ibsch, pp. 395-405. Amsterdam /Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co.
45.
Miall, D.S. ( 2006) Literary Reading: Empirical and Theoretical Studies. New York/Oxford: Peter Lang .
46.
Mills, S. ( 1995) Feminist Stylistics. London/ New York: Routledge.
47.
Morley, D. ( 1986) Family Television: Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure . London: Comedia.
48.
Morley, D. ( 1999) ‘The "Nationwide" Audience: Structure and Decoding (1980)’, in D. Morley and Charlotte BrunsdonThe ‘Nationwide’ Television Studies, pp. 111-291. London/ New York: Routledge.
49.
Mulvey, L. ( 1975) ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen16(3): 6-18.
50.
Myers, G.(2009) ‘Stylistics and "Reading-in-Talk" ’, Language and Literature18(3): 338-44.
51.
Potter, J. and Wetherell, M. ( 1987) Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour. London: SAGE.
52.
Prieur, A., Rosenlund, L. and Skjott-Larsen, J. ( 2008) ‘Cultural Capital Today: A Case Study from Denmark’ , Poetics36(1): 45-71.
53.
Radway, J. ( 1987 [1984]) Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. London: Verso.
St Clair, W. ( 2004) The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
56.
Short, M. ( 1993) ‘To Analyse a Poem Stylistically: "To Paint a Water Lilly" by Ted Hughes’, in P. Verdonk (ed.) Twentieth Century Poetry: From Text to Context, pp. 1-20. London/New York: Routledge.
57.
Simpson, P. and Hall, G. ( 2002) ‘Discourse Analysis and Stylistics’, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics22: 136-49.
58.
Staiger, J. ( 2005) Media Reception Studies. New York: New York University Press.
59.
Stockwell, P. ( 2000) ‘(Sur)real Stylistics: From Text to Contextualising’ , in T. Bex, M. Burke and P. Stockwell (eds) Contextualised Stylistics: In Honour of Peter Verdonk, pp. 15-38. Amsterdam : Rodopi.
60.
Stockwell, P. ( 2002) Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. London/New York: Routledge.
61.
Swann, J. and Allington, D.(2009) ‘Reading Groups and the Language of Literary Texts: A Case Study in Social Reading’, Language and Literature18(3): 247-64.
