How does our perspective change after the first reading? What distortions emerge through repetition? How do we determine what's worth rereading, and what is the role of such repetition in our lives? What are the gains and losses? Second Thoughts answers these questions and investigates the phenomenon of rereading narrative texts from various genres.
Contributors of this volume explore rereading children's literature, rereading Proust, how rereading functions in the oral tradition, and why so many people reread romances. Essays range from rereading Shakespeare and Spenser to rereading on a desert island and the rereading of hypertext.
Divided into five parts, "Overviews", "Origins", "Past", "Present", and "Musings and Beyond", this collection enriches the topic of rereading through its anthropological, psychological, and cultural approaches and offers a comprehensive survey of the subject of rereading. Second Thoughts is for anyone who's ever read a book twice.
