Reading with a Difference is a collection of eighteen essays that examines how issues of gender, race, and cultural identity inform texts from the seventeenth century to the present. Together the contributions document recent significant shifts occurring in the theoretical approach to the texts they study and illustrate how shifts in each of these categories affect how the others are viewed.

The first section of this anthology explores the notion that identity - particularly gender identity - is a cultural construct. The essays in the second section consider ways in which race and gender intersect with cultural identity and how encounters between different cultures challenge any identity constructed in isolation.

First published in the journal Criticism, these essays offer no blueprint for reading. Instead they encourage a rereading of canonical texts and a questioning of how these texts face matters of gender, race, and cultural identity; how they respond to the differences and the incongruities within the cultures from which they arise; and to which they speak.