Common Readers and the Varied Pleasures of Reading

Chapter 2, “Common Readers and the Varied Pleasures of Reading,” locates Dane’s concept of a common reader within classic conceptualizations of her. Dane’s guidance to common readers identified multiple purposes for reading, including enjoyment, education, social connection, and participation in civic and professional spheres. The chapter argues that in endorsing diverse forms of reading pleasure ranging from enthrallment, nostalgia, and critical insight to the experiences of estrangement and discovery, Dane builds the confidence of middlebrow readers, who were caricatured as often as they were guided by “experts.” Recognizing the periodical community she addressed, Dane emphasized readers’ shared experiences and their collective power to identify and sustain good writers in the marketplace. In her essays on poetry, Dane steers readers toward innovative, satisfying modern poetry, and in essays on fiction, she urges readers to choose collections of short stories over magazine stories. The chapter demonstrates Dane’s participation in cultural discourses associating mass media and new technologies with the production of inferior reading matter and with blunted reading experiences. It concludes that modernist poets and middlebrow critics like Dane shared concerns about the effect of mass culture on literary language, but that they devised different poetic and critical responses.