The Reader as Author

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.