The word “theory” appears in Raymond Williams’s original _Keywords_ (1976). He traces its origins back to the Greek _theoros_, meaning “spectator,” with its root in _thea_, for “sight,” which also gave us “theater.” As more recent commentators put it, “[T]he literal sense of looking has then been metaphorized to that of contemplating or speculating” (Wolfreys et al. 2006). The term became increasingly opposed to “practice,” not only as something removed from the everyday, but also as something involved in attempts to explain and model the everyday. Although the title of Williams’s work—_Keywords—_implicitly underwrites the importance of language, his own humanistic approach became more and more at odds with the “linguistic turn” in literary and cultural studies. Regardless of the recent shift toward making it more explicit, theory has always been present both in discussions of literary texts and in the texts themselves, even if an awareness of this has been lacking. Readers who declare that they are atheoretical, limiting themselves to the words on the page, are deceiving themselves. Readers always “frame” texts; merely to see a work as “literary” involves certain theoretical assumptions, as does presupposing a text is for “children”—let alone that it is “Romantic,” “realistic,” “allegorical,” “unsuitable,”...