ONLY READING: AN INTRODUCTION

With such questions in mind, The English Institute invited seven scholars- Frances Ferguson, Sheldon Pollock, Patricia Crain, Andrew Piper, Random Cloud, Christopher Cannon, and Garrett Stewart-to give papers on the practice, theory, history, and performance of Reading, the conference theme. they were asked to reflect broadly upon the diverse institutions and techniques that shape individuals' encounters with their reading matter from their respective fields or areas of critical interest and to think not merely about the history of reading but also about the historicity of reading practices. Unfortunately, we were unable to publish the two remarkable papers given by Random Cloud ("Sortes Virgilianae") and Sheldon Pollock ("Reading in Three Dimensions")-both of which represented major contributions to the conference and important inflections of our collective thinking about the theories, practices, and histories of Reading-but we are pleased to make these five essays available to ELH readers.\n In particular, the novelist and the novel (as Ferguson says of Richard Wright and his Native Son) claim for themselves the "philological privilege" to "assign dialect, malapropisms, and grammatical errors to its characters without itself taking on the mistakes in the process."