Picasso's Femme Couche ', which depicts a woman reclining and reading, appears appropriately on the cover of Richardson's study of novels by major modernist writers of fiction, who develop scenes of reading in their narratives. The engagement of the reader as an active participant is central to the modernist tradition in fiction, and, without technical jargon, Richardson (Univ. of Maryland) distinguishes between surface and reparative reading in this study. While he focuses on fiction by Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and Ralph Ellison, he also addresses William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, and writers beyond the English-American sphere, like Italo Calvino. The contexts for his examination of the role of "misinterpretation" in these works range from Cervantes's Don Quixote to Ian McEwan's Atonement . Richardson extends the range of the reader, as depicted in modernism, to as early as 1857 in Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary and sees modernist fiction as an "interpretive labyrinth." His introduction and chapter 5 can be read independently as well as interdependently among the other chapters. Richardson brings fresh insight to this aspect of modernism.

Summing Up: Highly recommended.