Crusoe's Books

This is a splendid book. * D. L. Patey, CHOICE *
In Crusoes Books, Bill Bell presents a unique and refreshing take on convict history combining exceptional scholarship with a gift for language and narrative style. Using the lens of literacy and observing its impact on the development of culture for those incarcerated or displaced, Bell presents the convict not only as the recipient of text, but as a reading subject. Bell traces the multifarious and embodied relationships of convicts to the printed word, placing this story firmly within an international context during a period of significant change in imperial history. The research is of high scholarly calibre and the writing is accessible and skilful. This is a beautifully crafted book. * Australian Historical Association *
This highly original book takes the metaphorical journey as a key to reading itself and goes on to provide several fascinating field histories of specific readers and reading, from prisoners to polar explorers. Providing several brilliant analyses, Crusoe's Books is striking in its erudition and its scholarship, offering a fresh reappraisal of the classical questions that have exercised historians of the book and reading. Bill Bell's book obliges us deeply to rethink the mobility of cultural hierarchies, the practices of popular literacy, and the uses of literature. * Roger Chartier, Collège de France *
Print is mobile, and where one reads matters. Bell's compelling study of traveling readers disrupts easy generalizations about what print consumption entails. Whether writing of emigrants or prisoners, explorers or soldiers, Bell brilliantly shows how reading could build community; offer escape or guidance to individuals; and complicate relationship to nation and Empire. Full of surprising and telling examples about the range of available texts and the different, often unpredictable ways they were read, Crusoe's Books is a major scholarly achievement. * Kate Flint, University of Southern California *
In this richly rewarding study of the dissemination of books through the contact zones that mark the edges of Empire, Bill Bell explores the waywardness of reading: the propensity of both free and unfree colonial subjects, Antarctic explorers, men and women at sea, and soldiers at the front to read athwart the cultural and political determinations of the libraries they assembled or the books they came across. Crusoe's Books is a major contribution to the history of Empire and the history of reading. * John Frow, University of Sydney *
The book admirably shows that such disparate reading constituencies spanning nearly a century share so much in common in spite of their circumstances. Bell's detailed case studies proves that recovering the experiences of readers can be done and done well. * Troy J. Bassett, Purdue University Fort Wayne, Modern Philology *
Crusoe's Books will appeal to anyone interested in the literary or social history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. * Lars Atkin, Modern Language Review *
Crusoe's Books will appeal to anyone interested in the literary or social history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. * Lars Atkin, Modern Language Review *