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A Continuous Present, Margaret L. Lundberg

Margaret Lundberg

The readers of a text are—in many ways—also its authors, with the act of reading creating a dialog between a text already written and a text generated through reader response, creating a community along the boundary between author and reader. To illustrate that boundary, I situated myself—through my research and writing—as a responding audience to nineteenth-century Iowa farm wife Emily Hawley Gillespie, as she is revealed through the pages of her thirty-year diary. Through a constructivist paradigm, the methodology of philosophical hermeneutics, new historicism, and the creative vehicle of fiction, I entered Gillespie’s text to examine the themes which emerged …