The Edinburgh History Of Reading

Reveals the experience of reading in many cultures and across the agesCovers reading practices around the world from 19th-century Africa to the reading of music in the 20th-century USEmploys a wide range of methodologies a Showcases new research including reading at night; readers as writers and critics; and 21st-century neuroscienceChallenges previous models with new data on travelling readers, images of readers, and digital reading and fan culturesModern Readers explores the myriad places and spaces in which reading has typically taken place since the eighteenth century, from the bedrooms of the English upper classes, through large parts of nineteenth-century Africa and on-board ships and trains travelling the world, to twenty-first-century reading groups. It encompasses a range of genres from to science fiction, music and self-help to Government propaganda.

Reveals the experience of reading in many cultures and across the agesCovers reading practices from China in the 6th century BCE to Britain in the 18th centuryEmploys a range of methodologies from close textual analysis to quantitative data on book ownershipExamines a wide range of texts and ways of reading them from English poetry and funeral elegies to translated books in PeruChallenges period-based models of readership historyEarly Readers presents a number of innovative ways through which we might capture or infer traces of readers in cultures where most evidence has been lost. It begins by investigating what a close analysis of extant texts from 6th-century BCE China can tell us about contemporary reading practices, explores the reading of medieval European women and their male medical practitioner counterparts, traces readers across New Spain, Peru, the Ottoman Empire and the Iberian world between 1500 and 1800, and ends with an analysis of the surprisingly enduring practice of reading aloud.

Reveals the experience of reading in many cultures and across the agesShows the experiences of ordinary readers in Scotland, Australasia, Russia, and ChinaExplores how digital media has transformed literary criticismPortrays everyday reading in art Includes reading across national and cultural linesCommon Readers casts a fascinating light on the literary experiences of ordinary people: miners in Scotland, churchgoers in Victorian London, workers in Czarist Russia, schoolgirls in rural Australia, farmers in Republican China, and forward to today's online book discussion groups. Chapters in this volume explore what they read, and how books changed their lives.

Reveals the experience of reading in many cultures and across the agesCovers reading practices around the world from 19th-century Africa to the reading of music in the 20th-century USEmploys a wide range of methodologies a Showcases new research including reading at night; readers as writers and critics; and 21st-century neuroscienceChallenges previous models with new data on travelling readers, images of readers, and digital reading and fan culturesModern Readers explores the myriad places and spaces in which reading has typically taken place since the eighteenth century, from the bedrooms of the English upper classes, through large parts of nineteenth-century Africa and on-board ships and trains travelling the world, to twenty-first-century reading groups. It encompasses a range of genres from to science fiction, music and self-help to Government propaganda.

Reveals the experience of reading in many cultures and across the agesCovers pornography and the origins of the transgender movementExplores everyday reading in Nazi GermanyAnalyses prison readingExamines reading in revolutionary societies and occupied nationsSubversive 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.

'The History of Reading' offers an accessible overview of this developing discipline, from the rise of literacy through to the current trend of book clubs.