By the end of the eighteenth century more women and working class readers existed than ever before, and as the ranks of readers grew, so did cultural fears about the dangerous effects of popular, untrained, promiscuous, escapist, or otherwise bad, reading. This course will investigate the democratization of the “reading public,” the debates about the dangers of reading that it provoked, and the ways that these arguments inflect, underlie, or diverge from contemporary anxieties about what constitutes bad reading, from Eve Sedgwick’s critique of paranoid reading to the now daily warnings about fake news. (18th/19th)