“This brilliant, passionately written book is an important and timely work of scholarship. Even those who disagree with Patterson’s arguments will respect the extraordinary ease with which she crosses the boundaries between the disciplines of history and literary studies. This book will be widely read, and its readers will benefit from its erudition and candor.” —Jean R. Brink, Arizona State University

For those exhausted by the highly charged debates and polarized climate of literary studies today, Annabel Patterson’s Reading Between the Lines offers a strategic compromise: a moderate stance between the radical opponents and the zealous protectors of the traditional Western canon. She reconsiders the value of reading the white, male, canonical writers of antiquity and of early modern England, finding in them a set of values different from those supposed by both sides in the Great Books quarrel. Rather than being the unthinking or deliberate promoters of political or cultural uniformity, these writers subjected such conventional notions to critical scrutiny and even promoted alternatives. The key to this revisionary argument is “reading between the lines,” a strategy usually associated with the eccentric conservativism of Leo Strauss, but which, Patterson shows, is not only implicit in all acts of interpretation, but played a particularly important role in an age when writing between the lines was often essential for the writer’s survival.