Reading Communities from Salons to Cyberspace [Hardcover]

Reading is both a social process and a social formation, as this book illustrates across centuries and cultural contexts. Highlighting links evident in reading communities from literary salons to online environments, each essay reflects the rich repertoire of research methods available to reading scholars.List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors An Introduction to Reading Communities: Processes and Formations;? D.Rehberg Sedo Reading in an Epistolary Community in Eighteenth-Century England; B.Schellenberg ? Nineteenth Century Reading Groups in Britain and the Community of the Text: an Experiment with Little Dorrit ; J.Hartley? Reading Across the Empire: the National Home Reading Union Abroad; R.Snape Utopian Civic-Mindedness: Robert Maynard Hutchins, Mortimer Adler, and the Great Books Enterprise;? D.Born 'I Used to Read Anything that Caught My Eye, But&': Cultural Authority and Intermediaries in a Virtual Young Adult Book Club; D.Rehberg Sedo The Growth of Reading Groups as a Feminine Leisure Pursuit: Cultural Democracy or Dumbing Down?; A.Kiernan? Speaking Subjects: Developing Identities in Book Groups; L.Howie? Leading Questions: Interpretive Guidelines in Contemporary Popular Reading Culture; A.S.Ivy Marionettes and Puppeteers?: The Relationship between Book Club Readers and Publishers; D.Fuller , C.Squires & D.Rehberg Sedo Bibliography Index

'This book makes an original and thought provoking contribution to scholarship in the history of reading, and highlights the ongoing research on reading groups taking place from a range of academic fields across the world. The editor's judicious selection of chapters demonstrates the disparate practices of readers in a range of social contexts, and powerfully reminds us that reading is as much a shared as an individual practice.'

- Shafquat Towheed, Lecturer in English, the Open University, UK

DANIEL BORN Lecturer, Northwestern University, USADANIELLE FULLER Senló&