^{Note 1} Eliot, Adam Bede, in The Works of George Eliot, i (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, [1878?]), 265 (Ch. xvii). Lukács, Studies in European Realism (New York: Grosset, 1964), p. 7. Holland, The Dynamics of Literary Response (New York: Norton, 1965), p. 85.

^{Note 2} Wolff, “The Radcliffean Gothic Model: A Form for Feminine Sexuality,” Modern Language Studies, 9, No. 3 (1979), 98–113. For a radically different view of Gothic imagery, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's brilliant “The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel,” PMLA, 96 (1981), 255–70.

^{Note 3} Bernard Bowron, Leo Marx, and Arnold Rose, “Literature and Covert Culture,” in Studies in American Culture: Dominant Ideas and Images, ed. Joseph J. Kwiat and Mary C. Turpie (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1960), pp. 84–95.

^{Note 4} Even so-called reader-oriented criticism has hardly touched on these problems, partly because so many of its most articulate representatives have been looking through the other end of the telescope, examining how texts are “made” by readers rather than how readers are reflected in texts. Of course, the number of writers currently grouped under the rubric “reader-oriented critics” is large and increasing constantly; and not all take this approach. Indeed, the central disagreement in reader criticism is between critics who argue for the individual's freedom to “create texts” and those who claim that the text imposes restrictions on response. But the former position is apparently more fashionable today. In some of its extreme formulations, text and author disappear altogether. See, for example, Stanley Fish's claim that Lycidas and The Waste Land are different poems only “because I have decided that they will be” (“Interpreting the Variorum,” Critical Inquiry, 2 [1976], 482). See also David Bleich, Readings and Feelings: An Introduction to Subjective Criticism (Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English, 1975); Norman Holland, 5 Readers Reading (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975); and Robert Crosman, “Some Doubts about 'The Reader of Paradise Lost,' ” College English, 37 (1975), 372–82. For some opposing views, see Wayne C. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974); Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974); Gerald Prince, “Introduction à l'étude du narrataire,” Poétique, 14 (1973), 178–96; and Susan Suleiman, “Interpreting Ironies,” Diacritics, 6, No. 2 (1976), 15–21. Attempts to debate several positions can be found in “In Defense of Authors and Readers,” ed. Edward Bloom, Novel, 11 (1977), 5–25. and in the series of short essays that make up the Oct. 1978 issue of Reader; for sharp historical insight into the problems of implied readers, see also Robert DeMaria, Jr., “The Ideal Reader: A Critical Fiction,” PMLA, 93 (1978), 463–74. For an exploration of the problem of texts that cast readers in demeaning and self-destructive roles, see Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1978). It is impossible, of course, to do justice to the expanding field of reader criticism in a single note; for a more extensive bibliography, see the one compiled by Inge Crosman in The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation, ed. Susan Suleiman and Inge Crosman (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980).

^{Note 5} This failure is particularly evident in the influential article by Walter J. Ong, S.J.. “The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction,” PMLA, 90 (1975), 9–21. See also Walker Gibson's pioneering essay, “Authors, Speakers, Readers, and Mock Readers,” College English. 11 (1950), 265–69.

^{Note 6} Peter J. Rabinowitz, “Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences,” Critical Inquiry, 4 (1977), 121–41.

^{Note 7} John Coleman, “[Interview with] Nabokov,” Spectator, 6 Nov. 1959, p. 619.

^{Note 8} John W. Loofbourow's attempt to solve this problem is similar to mine, but it is not entirely successful because he fails to distinguish between implied audiences. After defining realism as “any work in which the artist's assumptions about ‘reality’ are the same as those of his audience,” he elaborates: “When the artist's sense of ‘reality’ is the same as that of his public, their mutual preconceptions will be implied but seldom expressed and never examined” (“Literary Realism Redefined,” Thought, 45 [1970], 434, 437). But since he lumps together the authorial and narrative audiences, his definition falls apart. Surely the author and the authorial audience of Alice in Wonderland have the same preconceptions about reality; and while these may be played with, they are not “examined” in the sense of being called into serious question. Only the narrative audience has a different view of the world. And since, as Loofbourow notes, Dickens does undermine many of the preconceptions of his readers, we end up with the curious anomaly of a definition of realism that includes Carroll but excludes Dickens. Interesting as Loofbourow's approach is, then, it has serious limitations. For further development of his ideas, see his “Realism in the Anglo-American Novel: The Pastoral Myth,” in The Theory of the Novel: New Essays, ed. John Halperin (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 257–70.

^{Note 9} Robert Scholes, working from a different critical perspective, comes to much the same conclusion: “One context, made out of perceptual and experiential data held in common by author and audience, is always invoked by a fictional or mimetic context, whether ‘realistic’ or ‘fantastic’ This ‘real’ context provides a background against which we perceive and measure any pseudo-experiential or fictional context presented to us” (“Towards a Semiotics of Literature,” Critical Inquiry, 4 [1977], 116). See also Seymour Chatman, “Towards a Theory of Narrative,” New Literary History, 6 (1975), 295–318, esp. 304–06.

^{Note 10} For an amusing demonstration of the infinite regress that results when there are no unspoken assumptions and when, consequently, everything must be stated explicitly, see Lewis Carroll, “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles,” in Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (New York: Vintage-Knopf, 1976), pp. 1225–30.

^{Note 11} Farrell, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, in Studs Lonigan (New York: Modern Library, 1938), p. 132 (Ch. viii).

^{Note 12} James, The Novels and Tales of Henry James, New York Ed., xviii (New York: Scribners, 1909), 3 (Ch. i).

^{Note 13} Norman Mailer, An American Dream (New York: Dial, 1965), p. 1 (Ch. i).

^{Note 14} Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York: Scribners, 1929), p. 3 (Ch. i).

^{Note 15} For an excellent discussion of the rhetorical devices used in this passage, see Walker Gibson, Tough, Sweet and Stuffy: An Essay on American Prose Styles (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 28–42. For a somewhat different perspective, see Eric S. Rabkin, “Spatial Form and Plot,” Critical Inquiry, 4 (1977), 253–70, esp. 267–70. Rabkin's development of Auerbach's notions of hypotaxis and parataxis (in Mimesis) is of special interest here, since it runs parallel, in part, to some of my arguments in this essay. Rabkin's conception of parataxis, however, is both narrower than my term “assumption” (parataxis is a fairly specific technical device) and broader (parataxis includes not only those areas where author and reader agree but also those where the author forces the reader to make up his or her own mind).

^{Note 16} For an interesting discussion of black and white imagery in Othello, see G. M. Matthews, “Othello and the Dignity of Man,” in Marxists on Literature: An Anthology, ed. David Craig (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1975), pp. 110–33.

^{Note 17} Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson, in Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins, Uniform Ed. (New York: Harper, [1899?]), p. 224 (Conclusion).

^{Note 18} “Rats behind the Wainscoting: Politics, Convention, and Chandler's The Big Sleep,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 22 (1980), 224–45.