Ralph Waldo Emerson has written, in ‘The American Scholar’, that one of the greatest influences on the spirit of the intellectual is ‘the mind of the Past’ as transmitted through all art forms, but most persuasively through the reading of books. Much like Virginia Woolf in ‘Modern Fiction’ almost a century later, Emerson's awareness of the past leads him to exclaim: ‘Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this’. From the point of view of the writer, creative rewritings through reading are only the first step in the process of writing anew for the present and next generations.

Recently, The Henry James Review, contributing to the current critical interest in the culture, psychology and theory of reading, dedicated two issues to the topic ‘Reading James’. The multiple connotations of this theme – how we read James's texts and James himself, as well as suggesting an image of the reading author – is indicative of a new direction in reading theories. No longer is it necessary to annex the author so that the reader might have her say validated, as was the purview of early reception theorists. The author's own intra- and extratextual experiences of reading – both his or her own works and those of other writers – are now slowly being credited with providing a distinctive window into a literary work and, as such, as a newly sharpened hermeneutic tool. Put another way, the writer's reading can enhance the reader's reading.

Reading the writer reading (evidenced, for example, by intertextual allusions, parallels or direct quotations) can provide insight into both the text and the creative process of its composition because we can see the writer borrowing, adapting or pointing to the whole field of his or her art. In the case of a writer's non-fiction work, such as prefaces, essays, travel writing or autobiography (which should also be called literary), a further layer of complexity is added to this kind of meta-reading through the fact that the writer ‘speaks’ directly to the reader, often invoking a deliberate kind of reading through self-reflexive writing.