The History of Reading
International Perspectives, c. 1500-1990
S Towheed editor W Owens editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Palgrave Macmillan
Published:26th Aug '11
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This hardback is available in another edition too:
- Paperback£44.99(9781349320059)
RICHARD BELL Assistant Professor of History, University of Maryland, College Park, USA IAN DESAI Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer in South Asian Studies and History, Yale University, USA ILONA DOBOSIEWICZ Professor of English Literature, Opole University, Poland ARCHIE DICK Professor in the Department of Information Science, University of Pretoria, South Africa LAWRENCE DUGGAN Librarian and Researcher, Saint Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada SIMON ELIOT Professor of the History of the Book, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK JOHN FORD Maitre de Conferences in English and Head of Department of Languages and Literature, Champollion University in Albi, France BARBARA HOCHMAN Associate Professor of Literature, Ben Gurion University, Israel ISABELLE LEHUU Professor of History, Universite du Quebec a Montreal, Canada SUSANN LIEBICH Doctoral Candidate in History, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand BERTRUM H. MACDONALD is Professor of Information Management, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada KATE MCDOWELL Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA LILIANA PIASECKA Professor of Second Language Acquisition and Methodology of Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Opole University, Poland JEFFREY T. SALAR Historian of Modern German and Central Europe, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, USA
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.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.
'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
'...by scoping out some important new directions for the history of reading, this volume points to a bright future...' -Library & Information History
ISBN: 9780230247512
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 503g
222 pages