How does the historical misinterpretation of texts impact the way we receive them today? Professor Abigail Williams has published a new historical analysis of eighteenth-century readership, arguing that ‘reading it wrong’ may be, in some instances, the right thing to do.
In Reading It Wrong: An Alternative History of Early Eighteenth-Century Literature (Princeton University Press, 2023), Prof Williams uncovers an alternative reception history of major English literary works from the golden age of satire, including works by Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Mary Wortley Montagu, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. Prof Williams carefully examines archival materials, marginal annotations in original copies, and readers’ diaries and letters, emphasising how readers were puzzled by elusive and novel concepts. These stories of imperfect interpretation, she argues, bear a unique historical influence and significance, and might be compared to contemporary internet parody and digital culture.
The book is dedicated to the St Peter’s students Prof Williams has taught throughout her tenure as Fellow and Tutor in English. Encountering her subject and expertise through the fresh eyes of new readers challenged her concept of eighteenth-century readers. Were most eighteenth-century readers all that different from her twenty-first-century students? Was the ‘original’ audience, as she assumed, equipped with enough social, historical, political and cultural capital to interpret the texts perfectly? Or were they, like her own students, variously confused, taxed and misled by what they read? By thinking about what makes a ‘good reader’ in twenty-first-century Oxford, Prof Williams embarked on a journey to discover the imperfectly ‘good readers’ of eighteenth-century England.
Reading It Wrong has received praise in The Washington Post and Publishers Weekly, and has been touted as ‘a splendid and deeply original book: one of the most important works in eighteenth-century studies for quite some time’ (Joseph Hone, author of The Paper Chase: The Printer, the Spymaster, and the Hunt for the Rebel Pamphleteers).
About Prof Abigail Williams
Prof Williams is the Lord White Fellow and Tutor in English at St Peter’s College, Professor of English Literature and currently serves as the Associate Head of Research in the Humanities Division at the University of Oxford. She is an expert in eighteenth-century literature whose research ranges from politics and textual criticism to the history of readership. Beyond her significant academic profile, Prof Williams is also passionate about interdisciplinary collaboration and bridging the space between her academic subject and contemporary popular audiences. Her BBC radio series and appearances include ‘I Feel Therefore I Am’, ‘The Pedant's Progress’ and ‘Pride or Prejudice: How We Read Now’. In 2017, she co-wrote an ‘eighteenth-century grime’ song with the musician Jonny Berliner called ‘Understanding Misunderstanding’. She also recently collaborated with a local gaming company to create a social media chat-app game called WillPlay, designed to help encourage KS3-KS4 school audiences to interact with Shakespeare’s plays.
Learn more about Prof Williams’s latest book, Reading It Wrong: An Alternative History of Early Eighteenth-Century Literature (Princeton University Press, 2023), here.