Tilottama Rajan illuminates a crisis of representation within romanticism, evident in the proliferation of stylistically and structurally unsettled literary texts that resist interpretation in terms of a unified meaning. The Supplement of Reading investigates the role of the reader both in romantic literary texts and in the hermeneutic theory that has responded to and generated such texts. Rajan considers how selected works by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft explore the problem of understanding in relation to interpretive difference, including the differences produced by gender, class, and history.

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"In addition to offering an always subtle, often brilliant analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century modes of understanding, The Supplement of Reading meditates thoughtfully on the more recent transitional period during which literary studies moved with varying degrees of resoluteness from poststructuralism to cultural criticism."