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I am applying for a Summer Stipend to support writing the final chapter of my book, The Constitution of Literature: Literacy, Democracy, and the Rise of English Literary Criticism, during the summer of 2003. The book brings together current research in the history of the book with current debates in political philosophy. Focusing on debates over the definition of reading between the Civil Wars of the 1640s and the mid eighteenth-century works of Samuel Johnson, I reconfigure the political history of early English literary criticism. Where the current story of early English literary criticism sees it as contributing to the rise of the modern, rational public sphere, this approach instead traces a contest over democracies, plural.