Edinburgh History of Reading

Jonathan Rose is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History at Drew University, USA. He is the author of Readers’ Liberation (Oxford University Press, 2018), The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor (Yale University Press, 2014), which won the New Jersey Council for the Humanities Book Prize, and The Edwardian Temperament 1895-1919 (Ohio University Press, 1986). He is also the editor of The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation (University of Massachusetts Press, 2001) and co-editor of A Companion to the History of the Book (Blackwell, 2007) and British Literary Publishing Houses, 1820-1965 (Gale, 1991).

Taken together, the four volumes of The Edinburgh History of Reading constitute a fascinating compendium of research on readers and reading. […] The volumes successfully demonstrate the diversity of their subjects’ encounters with texts of all kinds, and highlight the importance of reading as both shared cultural practice and intensely individual experience.

• Introduction, Jonathan RoseChapter 1. History, Politics and the Separate Spheres: Women’s Reading in Eighteenth-Century Britain and America, Mark TowseyChapter 2. Reading in Australian Prisons: An Exploration of Motivation, Mary Carroll and Jane GarnerChapter 3. Hawking Terror: Reading the French Revolutionary Press, Valerae HurleyChapter 4. Hellfire and Cannibals: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Erotic Reading Groups and Their Manuscripts, Brian WatsonChapter 5. The Tactile Babble Under Which the Blind Have Hitherto Groaned: Dots, Lines, and Literacy for the Blind in Nineteenth-Century North America, Joanne L. PearceChapter 6. Reading and Literary Appreciation in Colonial Singapore, 1820-1860, Porscha FermanisChapter 7. The Making of a Moral Readership: Commentaries on English Education, India 1875-1930, Pramod K. NayarChapter 8. The ‘Pleasure and Profit’ of Reading: Adolescents and Juvenile Popular Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century, Trudi AbelChapter 9. Trans-culture and the Circulation of Ideas, Lisa Z. SigelChapter 10. Reading History, History Reading in Modern Iranian Literature: Prison-Writing as National Allegory or a World Literary Genre?, Alireza FakhrkonandehChapter 11. Beyond Mein Kampf: Bestsellers, Writers, Readers, and the Politics of Literature in Nazi Germany, Christian AdamChapter 12. Reading Spaces in Japanese-Occupied Indonesia: The Project to Create and Translate a Japanese-Language Library, Atsuhiko Wada, translated by Edward MackChapter 13. Just Send Zhivago: Reading Over, Under, and Through the Iron Curtain, Jessica BrandtChapter 14. African Readers as World Readers: UNESCO, Worldreader©, and the Perception of Reading, Ruth BushChapter 15. The Kindle Era: DIY Publishing and African American Readers, Kinohi NishikawaChapter 16. ‘I Loved the Stories, They Weren’t Boring’: Narrative Gaps, the ‘Disnarrated’, and the Significance of ‘Style’ in Prison Reading Groups, Patricia CanningList of Contributors