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Analyses the traces that readers across the ages have left behind 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. Mary Hammond is Professor of English and Book History at the University of Southampton Jonathan Rose is William R. Kenan Professor of History at Drew University.
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). 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).
