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Reveals the experience of reading in many cultures and across the ages
Bringing together the latest scholarship from all over the world on topics ranging from reading practices in ancient China to the workings of the twenty-first-century reading brain, the 4 volumes of the Edinburgh History of Reading demonstrate that reading is a deeply imbricated, socio-political practice, at once personal and public, defiant and obedient. It is often materially ephemeral, but it can also be emotionally and intellectually enduring.
Modern Readers explores the myriad places and spaces in which reading has typically taken place since the eighteenth century, from the bedrooms of the English upper classes, through large parts of nineteenth-century Africa and on-board ships and trains travelling the world, to twenty-first-century reading groups. It encompasses a range of genres from to science fiction, music and self-help to Government propaganda.
Mary Hammond is Professor of English and Book History at the University of Southampton.
List of contents
List of Contributors
List of Illustrations
Introduction:
Mary Hammond
Chapter 1. The Rise of Night Reading in Nineteenth-Century Britain,
Christopher Ferguson
Chapter 2. The book as prop in the missionary imagination: picturing Africans as readers,
Natalie Fossey and Lize Kriel
Chapter 3. Augustus De Morgan (1806-1871), his Reading, and his Library,
Karen Attar
Chapter 4. Gladstone Reads his Contemporaries,
Michael Wheeler
Chapter 5. Reading while Travelling in the Long Nineteenth Century,
Mary Hammond
Chapter 6. The empire reads back: Travel, exploration and the British World in the 18th and 19th Centuries,
John McAleer
Chapter 7. 'Knowledge of Books, Appreciation of Literature': Reading Choices of Aspiring American Librarians in the Progressive Era,
Christine Pawley Chapter 8. Papers, Posters, and Pamphlets: UK Readers in the Second World War,
Simon Eliot
Chapter 9. Peace of Mind in the Age of Anxiety: Rabbi Joshua Liebman and America's Post-war Therapeutic Faith,
Cheryl Oestreicher
Chapter 10. Reading and Classical Music in Mid-Twentieth Century America,
Joan Shelley Rubin
Chapter 11. Remaking the World through Reading: Books, Readers, and the Global Project of Modernity, 1945 to 1970,
Amanda Laugesen
Chapter 12. Amazing Stories 1950-1953: The Readers Behind the Covers,
Angelle Whavers
Chapter 13. The Other Digital Divide: Gendering Science Fiction Fan Reading in Print and Online, 1930 to the present,
Cait Coker
Chapter 14. 'A bolt is shot back somewhere in the breast' (Matthew Arnold, 'The Buried Life'): A methodology for literary reading in the 21st Century,
Philip Davis and Josie Billington
Bibliography of works cited and suggested further reading
Index of Methods and Sources
General Index
About the author
Mary Hammond is Professor of English and Book History at University of Southampton. She is a senior member of the management group of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project, 'The Reading Experience Database, 1800-1945'. She is the author of
Charles Dickens's Great Expectations: A Cultural Life, 1860-2012 (Ashgate, 2015) and
Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in England, 1880-1914 (Ashgate, 2006). She is also the co-editor of three books, including,
Publishing in the First World War: Essays in Book Hstory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Summary
Modern Readers explores the myriad places and spaces in which reading has typically taken place since the eighteenth century.
