Table of Contents List of Figures and Tables Acknowledgements 1 Introduction: Plotting the Reading Experience - Kjell Ivar Skjerdingstad and Paulette Rothbauer PART 1 - THEORY 2 The Hidden Foundations of Critical Reading - Magnus Persson 3 What Is a Reading Experience? The Development of a Theoretical and Empirical Understanding - Gitte Balling 4 Reimagining Reading - Gabrielle Cliff Hodges 5 Evidence of Reading? The Swedish Public's Letters to Selma Lagerlöf: Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches to the History of Reading - Jenny Bergenmar and Maria Karlsson 6 Byatt versus Bloom: or, Reading by Patricide versus Reading by Love - Marianne Borch 7 A Cognitive Poetic Approach to Researching the Reading Experience - Sara Whiteley 8 Tempering Ambiguity - The Quality of the Reading Experience - Kjell Ivar Skjerdingstad and Knut Oterholm PART 2 - PRACTICE 9 Fun "" and Other Reasons for Sharing Reading with Strangers: Mass Reading Events and the Possibilities of Pleasure - Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg Sedo 10 The Once and Future Self: (Re)reading Personal Lists, Notes, and Calendars - Pamela McKenzie and Elisabeth Davies 11 More Benefit from a Well-Stocked Library Than a Well-Stocked Pharmacy: How Do Readers Use Books as Therapy? - Liz Brewster 12 Literary Reading as a Social Technology: An Exploratory Study on Shared Reading Groups - Mette Steenberg 13 The Indescribable Described: Readers' Experiences When Reading about Tragic Loss - Eva Maria (Emy) Koopman 14 When Comics Set the Pace: The Experience of Time and the Reading of Comics - Lucia Cedeira Serantes 15 Reading Groups in Swedish Public Libraries - Kerstin Rydbeck PART 3 - POLITICS 16 ""I readed it!"" (Marissa, 4 years): The Experience of Reading from the Perspective of Children Themselves: A Cautionary Tale - Lynne (E.F.) McKechnie 17 Reading the Readers: Tracking Visible Online Reading Audiences - Marianne Martens 18 Literature in Common: Reading for Pleasure in School Reading Groups - Teresa Cremin and Joan Swann 19 Desire and Becoming - Multilingual Pupils' Reading Experiences - Joron Pihl and Kristin Skinstad van der Kooij 20 Experiencing the Social Melodrama in the Twenty-First Century: Approaches of Amateur and Professional Criticism - Cecilie Naper 21 The Republic of Readers: Book Clubs in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, 1815-1830 - Arnold Lubbers 22 ""Crazy Thirst for Knowledge"": Chinese Readers and the 1980s ""Book Series Fever"" - Shih-Wen Sue Chen 23 Enabling Testimonies and Producing Witnesses: Exploring Readers' Responses to Two Norwegian Post-Terror Blogs - Tonje Vold Notes on Contributors Index.