The History of Reading, Volume 1: International Perspectives, c. 1500-1990

Bringing together research from a variety of countries and periods, this volume introduces readers to the diverse approaches used to recover the evidence of reading through history in different societies, and asks whether reading practices are always conditioned by specific local circumstances or whether broader patterns might emerge. -- [(source)][1] [1]: https://www.amazon.com/History-Reading-International-Perspectives-1500-1990/dp/0230247512/ref=sr_1_3 '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 assumptions in the history of reading.' - James Raven, Professor in Modern History, University of Essex, UK Cover......Page 1 Contents......Page 10 List of Figures......Page 12 List of Tables......Page 13 Foreword......Page 14 Acknowledgements......Page 17 Notes on Contributors......Page 18 Introduction......Page 22 Part 1 Readers in the Medieval and Early Modern World......Page 34 1 Speaking of Reading and Reading the Evidence: Allusions to Literacy in the Oral Tradition of the Middle English Verse Romances......Page 36 2 Modes of Bible Reading in Early Modern England......Page 53 Part 2 Readers in the Enlightenment and Romantic World......Page 68 3 Weeping for Werther: Suicide, Sympathy and the Reading Revolution in Early America......Page 70 4 Reconstructing Reading Vogues in the Old South: Borrowings from the Charleston Library Society, 1811–1817......Page 85 Part 3 Readers in the Nineteenth-Century World......Page 106 5 Devouring Uncle Tom's Cabin: Antebellum 'Common' Readers......Page 108 6 Reading in Polish and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Silesia......Page 122 7 Reading Science: Evidence from the Career of Edwin Gilpin, Mining Engineer......Page 138 8 Reading in an Age of Censorship: The Case of Catholic Germany, 1800–1914......Page 154 Part 4 Readers in the Twentieth-Century World......Page 166 9 Understanding Children as Readers: Librarians' Anecdotes and Surveys in the United States from 1890 to 1930......Page 168 10 Letters to a Daughter: An Archive of Middle-Class Reading in New Zealand, c.1872–1932......Page 184 11 Books Behind Bars: Mahatma Gandhi's Community of Captive Readers......Page 199 12 Remembering Reading: Memory, Books and Reading in South Africa's Apartheid Prisons, 1956–90......Page 213 Further Reading and Weblinks......Page 229 Index......Page 232 Brings together a representative sample of research. Chapters cover individual readers, reading communities or groups and their engagement with texts in societies ranging from 19th century Poland and Germany, apartheid era South Africa, antebellum America, colonial Canada, India and New Zealand, and early modern England