From the Editors
Ralph Cohen sketches Iser’s involvement with New Literary History from the publication of “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach” (1972) to the editing and introducing of the “25th Anniversary Issue” (1994).

Introduction:
Wolfgang Iser’s Aesthetic Politics: Reading as Fieldwork
John Paul Riquelme

Restaging the Reception of Iser’s Early Work, or Sides Not Taken in Discussions of the Aesthetic
Brook Thomas

Staging as an Anthropological Category
Eric Gans

The Way of the Chameleon in Iser, Beckett, and Yeats: Figuring Death and the Imaginary in The Fictive and the Imaginary
John Paul Riquelme

“If Only I were Not Obliged to Manifest”: Iser’s Aesthetics of Negativity
Gabriele Schwab

A “Figure” in Iser’s “Carpet”
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan

The Four Sides of Reading: Paradox, Play, and Autobiographical Fiction in Iser and Rilke
Bianca Theisen

The “Imaginary” and Its Enemies
Murray Krieger

Iser’s Anthropological Reception of the Philosophical Tradition
Gabriel Motzkin

The Search for Distance: Negation and Negativity in Wolfgang Iser’s Literary Theory
Winfried Fluck

The Politics of Play: The Social Implications of Iser’s Aesthetic Theory
Paul B. Armstrong