The medieval reading process was unusually multi-faceted, and can surprise the modern reader by offering an alternative grid or map of a text we believe we know well -- one that cuts across or unsettles familiar stereotypes we all hold. These essays were collected together to offer practical, manuscript-based studies of medieval reading habits in use.

This book focuses on how Stanley Fish presents am "apologia" for his theory of reader-response by linking his account of interpretive assumptions with the dynamics of "faith," or religious belief.

The notion that Wells's best work includes some of his later discursive novels of ideas might seem perverse. This focuses on Wells's fiction of the 1920s and 1930s and its goal is to deepen appreciation of Wells as a literary artist. Any consideration of Wells's artistry necessarily entails a consideration of his ideas, and this book focuses primarily on his concept of time and of the human will.

Reflecting much nineteenth-century thought, Browning regarded time neither as an abstraction nor as a threat, but as the dynamic, creative medium in which the individual expresses and discovers a continuous self.

This book seeks to provide, by demonstrating that Daniel Defoe is a more deliberate thinker and a more calculatedly provocative teacher than is perhaps usually conceded, a context for the appreciation of the part which narrative contraries and dialectic play in his fiction.

Like the early nineteenth-century Romantics, Lawrence rejected traditional religious doctrines but was unable to embrace the concept of a purely materialistic universe. Like them he sought spiritual meaning in life by pursuing the supernatural through the natural, unity through diversity. His travel books are, among other things, a record of that search and of his attempts to express its personal and social significance.