“Reading” is a mode of criticism, as recent trends—distant reading, surface reading, reparative reading, neoformalist reading—affirm. Michaela Bronstein adds reading “out of context” to the list. But whereas the other methods stay close to historical, political, or theoretical frameworks, Bronstein’s approach aims to free the study of fiction from such determinants. She respects the latter, but “the exciting thing about literary objects,” she contends, “is that their uses are often counter to the contexts that present them—especially when read transnationally and transhistorically” (23). Historicism overlooks such alternative reading in seeing “literature as more the consequence of its context than as having its own consequences; theory tends to imply political consequences without necessarily determining whether such consequences have actually followed the works of art in question” (61). Bronstein fleshes out the freedom of texts from constraining alignments by using modernists—Henry James, Conrad, Faulkner—as models for the transcendence of contexts, then enlisting...

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