Reading is literary criticism's fundamental tool. More significantly, our identities and intelligences are formed through reading. However, despite its cultural significance, its operations are too often taken for granted. This book begins a process of reflection on the activity of reading that is vital for any serious student of literature, theory or print culture. Providing both a history of reading and an examination of key topics, Vincent Quinn uses a range of critical approaches to analyse: the role of reading in forming and undermining individual and collective identities its place in ideological structures its relation to theories of class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity its historical mutations and possible futures its complex relation to hermeneutics, or the science of interpretation. He ranges from the rise of literacy and early constructions of reading to recent scientific insights, and examines a full range of reading practices, positions and strategies, from close reading and New Criticism through to deconstruction, Marxism, psychoanalysis, post-colonialism, queer reading and other contemporary approaches. Emphasising the way in which the functions of reading and the meanings that it produces are determined by cultural, historical and ideological frameworks, Vincent Quinn's Reading is a thought-provoking guide to what it is at once the the core activity and the most fundamentally important topic and in the field of literary studies.