Vested Reading: Writing the Self Through Ethan Frome

Abstract

This essay builds on the work of Wolfgang Iser, Janice Radway, E. H. Gombrich, and other theorists of reading to argue for a new approach to the reading encounter, which I call vested reading. Vested reading is a means of engaging with the literary text in a way that reads the self into the book one holds in one’s hands while also attending to issues of literary form. I turn to Edith Wharton’s novella Ethan Frome and its popular reception in order to flesh out my understanding of vested reading as a practice that realigns life-worlds, while reconstructing the world of the text in ways relevant to readers’ lives.