"The Deed of Reading is a dazzling, transformative book. Garrett Stewart´s supple, lambent, witty prose is itself a laboratory of the effects to which he pays attention. This is a critical poetics, a poetry of criticism, with Stewart´s prose a field of elucidating experience: it is consistently smart, alert, and animated. The Deed of Reading is exhilarating. It´s not just that we’ll never read Eliot, Poe, or Dickens the same way again; we’ll never read the daily newspaper the same way again."—Susan Wolfson, Princeton University, author of Romantic Interactions: Social Being and the Turns of Literary Action