Matthew Arnold and Rereading

This essay probes the general topic of how an idea of rereading a text and seeing it differently from previous readings can be accommodated in rigorous criticism without slipping into the assertion that texts are merely radically unstable and meaning subjective. It surveys the absence of serious analyses of this problem and compares what has been said with Matthew Arnold's apparent sense in his prose criticism that re-reading only involves a change of view if the first reading has in some way been defective.