Theorizing, Reading, and Theorizing Reading Foxe's Actes and Monuments

How does Foxe's Actes and Monuments describe or theorize the practice of
reading? What might theory tell us about Foxe's text? Foxe's text enjoins a
host of different reading strategies on its audience: how might this massive
tome provoke an examination of what it is we do when we read? The recent glut
of electronic editions of the Actes and Monuments, from CD-ROMs to online
variorums, only makes this question more pressing: what sort of reading do
these editions allow and demand? Does Evelyn Tribble's dictum that the Actes
and Monuments is "now one of the great unread books of Anglo-American culture"
["The Peopled Page: Polemic, Confutation, and Foxe's Book of Martyrs," in The
Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture, ed. George Bornstein and
Theresa Tinkle, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 113] still
hold true or have these newer editions restored Foxe to the domain of the
accessible and readable? How do the famous images from this text intervene in
the process of reading? This anthology hopes to bring explicitly literary and
theoretically-inflected reading strategies to bear on the Actes and Monuments,
explore the ways in which the text theorizes its own reading, and discuss the
future of reading Foxe's mammoth text.

Please send 500-word abstracts by 1 February 2006 to Thomas Anderson
(tpa14_at_msstate.edu) or Ryan Netzley (rnetzley_at_siu.edu).

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Received on Tue Nov 08 2005 - 17:13:54 EST