The History of Reading

The History of Reading offers an engaging, accessible overview from the rise of literacy through to the current trend of ‘book clubs’.

Divided into seven sections, each with a useful introduction, this Reader:

• summarises the main debates and perspectives shaping the field
• introduces key theorists such as Iser, Fish and Bakhtin
• surveys influential works and outlines important studies on mass reading
• focuses on specific communities such as Welsh miners, African American library users and Australian convicts
• looks at individual readers from a variety of countries, classes and historical periods
• considers current research in the history of reading.

Providing both a clear introduction to the history of the field and a taster of the breadth, diversity and vitality of current debates, this Reader is an essential resource for undergraduates, graduates, and researchers.

Shafquat Towheed is Lecturer in English at The Open University, where he is also Project Supervisor for The Reading Experience Database, 1450-1945 (RED). He is the editor of The Correspondence of Edith Wharton and Macmillan, 1901-1930 (2007), of New Readings in the Literature of British India, c.1780-1947 (2007).

Rosalind Crone is Lecturer in History at the Open University, where she is Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded project, The Reading Experience Database, 1450-1945 (RED). She has published widely on popular culture, crime and literacy in the nineteenth-century, and is co-editor of New Perspectives in British Cultural History (2007).

Katie Halsey is lecturer at the University of Stirling. She has published several articles on nineteenth-century literary culture, is currently co-editing a collection of essays on the subject of conversation in the long eighteenth century, and writing a monograph about Jane Austen’s readers.