Reading Communities from Salons to Cyberspace

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

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2. An Introduction to Reading Communities: Processes and Formations

   • DeNel Rehberg Sedo

   Pages 1-24

3. Reading in an Epistolary Community in Eighteenth-Century England

   • Betty A. Schellenberg

   Pages 25-43

4. Nineteenth-Century Reading Groups in Britain and the Community of the Text: an Experiment with Little Dorrit

   • Jenny Hartley

   Pages 44-59

5. Reading Across the Empire: the National Home Reading Union Abroad

   • Robert Snape

   Pages 60-80

6. Utopian Civic-Mindedness: Robert Maynard Hutchins, Mortimer Adler, and the Great Books Enterprise

   • Daniel Born

   Pages 81-100

7. ‘I Used to Read Anything that Caught My Eye, But …’: Cultural Authority and Intermediaries in a Virtual Young Adult Book Club

   • DeNel Rehberg Sedo

   Pages 101-122

8. The Growth of Reading Groups as a Feminine Leisure Pursuit: Cultural Democracy or Dumbing Down?

   • Anna Kiernan

   Pages 123-139

9. Speaking Subjects: Developing Identities in Women’s Reading Communities

   • Linsey Howie

   Pages 140-158

10. Leading Questions: Interpretative Guidelines in Contemporary Popular Reading Culture

    • Anna S. Ivy

    Pages 159-180

11. Marionettes and Puppeteers? The Relationship between Book Club Readers and Publishers

    • Danielle Fuller, DeNel Rehberg Sedo, Claire Squires

    Pages 181-199

12. Back Matter

    Pages 200-218

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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.

• Britain
• culture
• cyberspace
• democracy
• England
• environment
• essay
• Great Britain
• knowledge
• media
• methods
• Online
• reading culture
• research methods
• subject

'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, USA DANIELLE FULLER Senior Lecturer, University of Birmingham, UK JENNY HARTLEY Professor of English Literature, Roehampton University, London LINSEY HOWIE Associate Professor, La Trobe University, Australia ANNA IVY Senior Lecturer in English, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA ANNA KIERNAN Head of the Department of Writing, University College Falmouth, UK BETTY A. SCHELLENBERG Professor and Chair of English, Simon Fraser University, Canada BOB SNAPE Centre for Worktown Studies, University of Bolton, UK CLAIRE SQUIRES Professor of Publishing Studies, University of Stirling, UK

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