Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
-George Santayana
Given that the nature of this research crosses several established subfields of artificial intelligence study, it is necessary to view related work from several backgrounds. Given that the nature of this work is interdisciplinary and has been influenced by a number of fields in addition to artificial intelligence, it is also necessary to view the related work from several disciplines. To accomplish this goal, this chapter begins by presenting a brief overview of work done on the subject of reading from education, psychology, and artificial intelligence. As creativity is also an important aspect of my work, creativity research from psychology and artificial intelligence research is discussed next. Finally, some specific work on topics which are closely related to my ideas of creative understanding (conceptual combination and explanation-based learning) is presented.