Reading Home Cultures Through Books

This wide-ranging, comparative, and multidisciplinary collection addresses the significance of books in creating the idea of home. The chapters present cases that reveal the affective and sensory dimensions of books and reading in the practice of everyday life of individuals, in communities, and in society. The complex relationship of books, reading, and home is explored through American and European case studies both in bourgeois and middle-class homes, and in working-class and immigrant families and communities with limited possibilities for reading. The volume combines the conceptions and representations of domesticity, the materiality of reading, and library as a place, drawing on book history and material culture studies as well as anthropology and sociology of the home.

Kirsti Salmi-Niklander is a Senior Lecturer in Folklore Studies in the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki, Finland.

Marija Dalbello is a Professor of Information Studies in the School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University, USA.