The University of Wisconsin Press

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Reading Between the Lines Annabel Patterson “This brilliant, passionately written book is an important and timely work of scholarship. Even those who disagree with Patterson’s arguments will respect the extraordinary ease with which she crosses the boundaries between the disciplines of history and literary studies. This book will be widely read, and its readers will benefit from its erudition and candor.” —Jean R. Brink, Arizona State University For those exhausted by the highly charged debates and polarized climate of literary studies today, Annabel Patterson’s Reading Between the Lines offers a strategic compromise: a moderate stance between the radical opponents and the zealous protectors of the traditional Western canon. She reconsiders the value of reading the white, male, canonical writers of antiquity and of early modern England, finding in them a set of values different from those supposed by both sides in the Great Books quarrel. Rather than being the unthinking or deliberate promoters of political or cultural uniformity, these writers subjected such conventional notions to critical scrutiny and even promoted alternatives. The key to this revisionary argument is “reading between the lines,” a strategy usually associated with the eccentric conservativism of Leo Strauss, but which, Patterson shows, is not only implicit in all acts of interpretation, but played a particularly important role in an age when writing between the lines was often essential for the writer’s survival. Patterson argues that, if we learn how to read those old and seemingly alien texts, which themselves responded to rapid and unsettling change in the arenas of religion, politics, and education, they have much that is liberating to tell us about our own expanding culture, including the importance of republican constitutionalism, freedom of speech, and civic and religious toleration. This salutary redefinition of “humanism” arises from Patterson’s essays on Plato, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton; but the book also deals with the “gendered” topics of rape and divorce and with “popular culture” in the sixteenth century and today. These interests are not on opposite sides of some theoretical boundary, but (as Patterson demonstrates from contemporary novels by Joseph Heller and Nancy Price) interdependent. Annabel Patterson is professor of English and literature at Duke University. Her other books include Censorship and Interpretation, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press. For more information regarding publicity and reviews contact our publicity manager, phone: (608) 263-0734, email: publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu

December 1992 LC: 92-050257 PR 320 pp. 6 x 9 ISBN-10: 0-299-13544-6 ISBN-13: 978-0-299-13544-7 Paper $19.95 s The 1992 cloth edition of this book is out of print, but the paperback is still available. Add titles to your shopping cart by clicking on the "Add this book to cart" link above. You can submit your order electronically, paying for it with your credit card. Click here for a further explanation of the shopping cart feature Never ordered from us before? Read this first.

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