The History of Reading (PDF)

Volume 1 RICHARD BELL Assistant Professor of History, University of Maryland, College Park, USA IAN DESAI Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer in South Asian Studies and History, Yale University, USA ILONA DOBOSIEWICZ Professor of English Literature, Opole University, Poland ARCHIE DICK Professor in the Department of Information Science, University of Pretoria, South Africa LAWRENCE DUGGAN Librarian and Researcher, Saint Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada SIMON ELIOT Professor of the History of the Book, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK JOHN FORD Maître de Conférences in English and Head of Department of Languages and Literature, Champollion University in Albi, France BARBARA HOCHMAN Associate Professor of Literature, Ben Gurion University, Israel ISABELLE LEHUU Professor of History, Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada SUSANN LIEBICH Doctoral Candidate in History, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand BERTRUM H. MACDONALD is Professor of Information Management, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada KATE MCDOWELL Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA LILIANA PIASECKA Professor of Second Language Acquisition and Methodology of Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Opole University, Poland JEFFREY T. SALAR Historian of Modern German and Central Europe, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, USA Volume 2 SOPHIE BANKES Doctoral Student, The Open University, UK ADRIAN BINGHAM Senior Lecturer in Modern History, University of Sheffield, UK ROSALIND CRONE Lecturer in History, The Open University, UK SIMON ELIOT Professor of the History of the Book, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK DAVID FINKELSTEIN Research Professor of Media and Print Culture, Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, UK LINDA FLEMING Postdoctoral Researcher for the Scottish Readers Remember

'This consequential volume extends our understanding of reading in time and space. Importantly, the book takes us into the colonial and postcolonial worlds, a dimension generally lacking in scholarship on histories of reading. The book offers a dazzling array of case studies - Gandhi in prison, Protestant Bible readers in early modern England, Polish nationalists, political prisoners in South Africa and many more. Each meticulously researched essay demonstrates that understanding how people read is a key dimension in any intellectual history. This book considerably extends the frontiers of scholarship on histories of reading, print culture and book history. Lucidly written, this treasure trove will delight anyone who loves books and reading.' - Professor Isabel Hofmeyr, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

'This impressive collection of essays interrogates a remarkable range of surviving evidence of reading practices and experiences from the medieval to the modern. Here we have a series of intelligent and evidence-based investigations of one of the most debated topics in recent cultural history: the varying definitions and modes of reading. The sources used are as diverse as the places and ages of the study of reading, inviting extensive reconsideration of how and why people read and of our understanding of what women, men and children thought they were doing when they read. Comparative perspectives combine to refocus attention to questions of intensive and extensive reading, of the relationship between orality, writing and print, the changing nature of literacy (and different, contemporary and overlapping literacies), and the quest to find evidence of readers' responses. The great success of the collection is to bring forward this plethora of new historical case studies using memoirs, diaries, library circulation records, and marginalia and other textual clues to test both established historical interpretations and familiar theoretical