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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.
Subversive Readers explores the strategies used by readers to question authority, challenge convention, resist oppression, assert their independence and imagine a better world. This kind of insurgent reading may be found everywhere: in revolutionary France and Nazi Germany, in Eastern Europe under Communism and in Australian and Iranian prisons, among eighteenth-century women reading history and nineteenth-century men reading erotica, among postcolonial Africans, the blind, and pioneering transgender activists.
Jonathan Rose is William R. Kenan Professor of History at Drew University.
Mary Hammond is Professor of English and Book History at the University of Southampton.
List of contents
Introduction, Jonathan Rose; Chapter 1. History, Politics and the Separate Spheres: Women's Reading in Eighteenth-Century Britain and America, Mark Towsey; Chapter 2. Reading in Australian Prisons: An Exploration of Motivation, Mary Carroll and Jane Garner; Chapter 3. Hawking Terror: Reading the French Revolutionary Press, Valerae Hurley; Chapter 4. Hellfire and Cannibals: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Erotic Reading Groups and Their Manuscripts, Brian Watson; Chapter 5. The Tactile Babble Under Which the Blind Have Hitherto Groaned: Dots, Lines, and Literacy for the Blind in Nineteenth-Century North America, Joanne L. Pearce; Chapter 6. Reading and Literary Appreciation in Colonial Singapore, 1820-1860, Porscha Fermanis; Chapter 7. The Making of a Moral Readership: Commentaries on English Education, India 1875-1930, Pramod K. Nayar; Chapter 8. The 'Pleasure and Profit' of Reading: Adolescents and Juvenile Popular Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century, Trudi Abel; Chapter 9. Trans-culture and the Circulation of Ideas, Lisa Z. Sigel; Chapter 10. Reading History, History Reading in Modern Iranian Literature: Prison-Writing as National Allegory or a World Literary Genre?, Alireza Fakhrkonandeh; Chapter 11. Beyond Mein Kampf: Bestsellers, Writers, Readers, and the Politics of Literature in Nazi Germany, Christian Adam; Chapter 12. Reading Spaces in Japanese-Occupied Indonesia: The Project to Create and Translate a Japanese-Language Library, Atsuhiko Wada, translated by Edward Mack; Chapter 13. Just Send Zhivago: Reading Over, Under, and Through the Iron Curtain, Jessica Brandt; Chapter 14. African Readers as World Readers: UNESCO, Worldreader©, and the Perception of Reading, Ruth Bush; Chapter 15. The Kindle Era: DIY Publishing and African American Readers, Kinohi Nishikawa; Chapter 16. 'I Loved the Stories, They Weren't Boring': Narrative Gaps, the 'Disnarrated', and the Significance of 'Style' in Prison Reading Groups, Patricia Canning; List of Contributors; Index.
About the author
Jonathan Rose is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History at Drew University, USA. He is the author of
Readers' Liberation (Oxford University Press, 2018),
The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor (Yale University Press, 2014), which won the New Jersey Council for the Humanities Book Prize, and
The Edwardian Temperament 1895-1919 (Ohio University Press, 1986). He is also the editor of
The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation (University of Massachusetts Press, 2001) and co-editor of
A Companion to the History of the Book (Blackwell, 2007) and
British Literary Publishing Houses, 1820-1965 (Gale, 1991).
Summary
Subversive Readers explores the strategies used by readers to question authority, challenge convention, resist oppression, assert their independence and imagine a better world.
