The Printed Reader

"Don Quixote’s influence on eighteenth-century fiction is too pervasive to ignore, and Dale’s The Printed Reader makes an important new argument about the nature of quixotic reading. With attention to the gendered implications of reading as an act of imprinting the mind, Dale’s skillful analysis of quixotic novels and the history of printing is both timely and illuminating."

~Aaron R. Hanlon, Colby College

"Dale conducts a subtle and interestingly circular argument about quixotism and gender....[A]n ingenious, energetic and polished book, which cleverly associates a number of current critical concerns."

~Times Literary Supplement

"The Printed Reader is a brilliant contribution to the study of how eighteenth-century British writers understood Don Quixote and deployed quixotic parody in their works."

~Journal of British Studies

"The Printed Reader offers a multifaceted and chronological argument about the quixote as an impressionable reader whose reading practice reflects the printing technologies from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries [and] draws on a range of eighteenth-century contexts—philosophy, play acting, sensibility, spirituality (Methodism), and politics (Jacobinism)—to demonstrate convincingly that the quixotic reader was indeed a satirical trope."

~Eighteenth Century Fiction

"The eponymous figuration ‘printed reader’ signals allegiance to a metaphor crucial to the text and as noble as any, the impressible human mind: sensations impress or imprint on the mouldable mind making impressions that shape consciousness and how we read the world."

~The Shandean

"Illuminating."

~Eighteenth-Century Fiction

“The Printed Reader exemplifies the best kind of scholarship, combining immense learning about material culture with astute close textual readings, readings attentive at once to sense and nuance, as well as to the materiality of the page and of print technology. The many new understandings that emerge from this alembic are adroitly introduced back into the crucible of scholarly conversations on all the many interconnected aspects of eighteenth-century literature and culture which it has brought together.” ~Eighteenth-Century Studies