"Presents a number of important Americanist scholars doing substantial and thought-provoking work. These scholars rethink responses to canonical works and come to important new undertsandings of women's and African American writing... "Readers in History" suggests that new attention to the social dynamics of reading will generate important new understandings of nineteenth-century American literature." -- John Evelev, "Nineteenth-Century Prose"

James L. Machor is associate professor of American literature at Kansas State University. He is the author of Pastoral Cities: Urban Ideals and the Symbolic Landscape of America.