Reading Communities from Salons to Cyberspace

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.

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