The Myth of the Sovereign Reader: Reimagining Readerly Autonomy

This Element interrogates the contemporary librarian's dominant view of readerly autonomy as sovereign consumption. According to that view, autonomous recreational readers choose what to read on the basis of preferences that are authentic (i.e., they form endogenously and absent social interference) and epistemically accessible (i.e., they are coherent and discoverable 'in the reader'). Despite some virtues, an examination of the fundamentally social nature of reading under oppressive conditions-including pervasive inequities in the Anglophone publishing industry-reveals this account to be conceptually inadequate and out of step with critical library practice. The Element posits that a relational and multidimensional theory of autonomy can better accommodate the social nature of reading and the social embeddedness of readers. This has significant implications for library praxis and the ways in which cultural intermediaries work with recreational readers across contexts. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.