Abstract

In 1929, I. A. Richards observed in Practical Criticism that “every response is ‘subjective’ in the sense that it is a psychological event determined by the needs and resources of a mind,” and he concluded, “we have a real problem about the relative values of different states of mind, about varying forms, and degrees, of order in the personality.”1 Indeed, more than eighty years later, we still do. One main reason we still do is that, despite considerable efforts by reader-response, psychoanalytic, and postmodern theorists to understand identity, literary scholars have so far found no good way of conceptualizing reader variation—a way that offers real explanatory insight. They accept that readers differ—how could ..