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.

'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

Autorentext
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

Inhalt
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