Jane Tompkins (born 1940) is an American literary scholar who has worked on canon formation, feminist literary criticism, and reader response criticism.
[7] Tompkins developed her idea of texts doing cultural work in her 1985 book Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860.
She argues that texts (e.g. novels) do "a certain kind of cultural work within a specific historical situation."
To her, "plots and characters" provide "society with a means of thinking about itself, defining certain aspects of a social reality which the authors and their readers shared, dramatizing its conflicts, and recommending solutions.
It is the notion of literary texts as doing work, expressing and shaping the social context that produced them, that I wish to substitute finally for the critical perspective that sees them as attempts to achieve a timeless, universal ideal of truth and formal coherence.