"Regulating Readers adds to a growing body of scholarship by women which shows eighteenth-century women writers in positions of agency, and as envisioning for themselves authoritative critical positions and roles in the public sphere. Bringing into dialogue novels and periodicals authored by men and women, Gardiner uncovers the ways in which eighteenth-century fiction helped to shape professional critical practices and to define the role and function of the professional critic in the eighteenth century."--BOOK JACKET.