This is the first major book in English on literary reading to be based on empirical methods. Moving the focus away from interpretation to the experience of literary texts, these studies demonstrate the role played by feeling in readers' responses, showing how feeling performs important functions during reading that cannot be accounted for by cognitive understanding. These studies not only reinvigorate the concept of literariness, they are also thoroughly interdisciplinary, offering a coherent approach to literary reading that draws on literary theory, psychology, neuropsychology, and evolutionary psychology. Several chapters help to introduce the empirical approach for students.

In Defamiliarizing the Aboriginal, Julia V. Emberley examines the historical production of aboriginality in colonial cultural practices and its impact on the everyday lives of indigenous women, youth, and children.

This book deals with the role of the category of "scripture" within adequate theories of textuality and culture. Wesley Kort is interested in the practice of reading a text as though it were scripture. Beginning with John Calvin's theory of reading, Kort shows that the theory and practice of reading as detailed by Calvin are applied to other texts that begin to be read as scripture and eventually, in the modern period, replace the reading of the Bible as scripture. These alternative texts are, beginning in the sixteenth century, nature, then, in the early eighteenth century, history, and, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, literature. Kort argues that what we take as modernity is based on a practice of reading, not in what it means to read, but in what texts are read as scripture. He argues that the postmodernist attempt not to read anything at all as scripture is an illusion that the theories of reading of Maurice Blanchot and Julia Kristeva expose. In conclusion, Kort raises the question of what it might mean today to again read the Bible as though it were scripture, that is, to read the Bible with practices indicated by Blanchot and Kristeva.

Since the structuralist debates of the 1970s the field of textual analysis has largely remained the preserve of literary theorists. Social scientists, while accepting that observation is theory laden have tended to take the meaning of texts as given and to explain differences of interpretation either in terms of ignorance or bias. In this important contribution to methodological debate, Peter Ekegren uses developments within literary criticism, philosophy and critical theory to reclaim this study for the social sciences and to illuminate the ways in which different readings of a single text are created and defended.

Reading Television was the first book to push the boundaries of television studies beyond the insights offered by cultural studies and textual analysis, creating a vibrant new field of study. Using the tools and techniques in this book, it is possible for everyone with a television set to analyze both the programmes, and the culture which produces them. In this edition, Hartley reflects on recent developments in television studies, and includes suggestions for further reading. His new foreword underlines the continuing relevance of this foundational text in the study of contemporary culture.

In the fourth and final volume of the Memory Ireland series, Frawley and O’Callaghan explore the manifestations and values of cultural memory in Joyce’s Ireland, both real and imagined. An exemplary author to consider in relation to questions of how history is remembered and recycled, Joyce creates characters who confront particularly the fraught relationship between the individual and the historical past; between the crisis of colonial history and the colonized state; and between the individual’s memory of his or her own past and the past of the broader culture. The collection includes leading Joyce scholars—Vincent Cheng, Anne Fogarty, Luke Gibbons, and Declan Kiberd—and considers such topics as Jewish memory in Ulysses, history and memory in Finnegans Wake, and Joyce and the Bible.

Jay Watson argues that southern literary studies has been overidealized and dominated by intellectual history for too long. In Reading for the Body, he calls for the field to be rematerialized and grounded in an awareness of the human body as the site where ideas, including ideas about the U.S. South itself, ultimately happen. Employing theoretical approaches to the body developed by thinkers such as Karl Marx, Colette Guillaumin, Elaine Scarry, and Friedrich Kittler, Watson also draws on histories of bodily representation to mine a century of southern fiction for its insights into problems that have preoccupied the region and nation alike: slavery, Jim Crow, and white supremacy; the marginalization of women; the impact of modernization; the issue of cultural authority and leadership; and the legacy of the Vietnam War. He focuses on the specific bodily attributes of hand, voice, and blood and the deeply embodied experiences of pain, illness, pregnancy, and war to offer new readings of a distinguished group of literary artists who turned their attention to the South: Mark Twain, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Katherine Anne Porter, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Walker Percy. In producing an intensely embodied U.S. literature these writers, Watson argues, were by turns extending and interrogating a centuries-old tradition in U.S. print culture, in which the recalcitrant materiality of the body serves as a trope for the regional alterity of the South. Reading for the Body makes a powerful case for the body as an important methodological resource for a new southern studies.