READING IN AMERICA

Erscheinungsjahr 1989
ISBN: 978-0-8018-3800-2
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press

Buch, Englisch, 320 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 522 g

What is a book? Cathy N. Davidson brings together twelve distinguished authors to offer the first history of books in America from Puritan time to the present—and to introduce American readers to the exciting field of inquiry known in France as histoire du livre. Drawing on the methodologies of history, education, literary studies, ethnography, and bibliography, the authors explore subjects ranging from book production and publishing practices to the role books played in the lives of American women and men, minorities, workers, and immigrants.

Robert Darnton described the "communications circuit" that brings books from author to reader. Donald Lazere suggests America's "one dimensional" oral media threaten to render books irrelevant. In other revisionist essays, Barbara Sicherman discovers that reading practices of late-Victorian women contrdict rading-revolution theory; Janice A. Radway analyzes the selection process of the Book-of-the-month Club and the formation of middle-brow culture; and Victor Neuburg asks how we can understand the intellectual life of the poor when the books they read—eraly American chapbooks, for instance—no longer exist.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Davidson, Cathy N.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. What is the History of Books?
Chapter 2. Literacy Instruction and Gender in Colonial New England
Chapter 3. Chapbooks in America
Chapter 4. A Republican Literature
Chapter 5. The World in Black and White
Chapter 6. The Life and Times of Charlotte Temple
Chapter 7. Antebellum Reading and the Ironies of Technological Innovation
Chapter 8. Sense and Sensibility
Chapter 9. Reflections on the Changing Publishing Objectives of Secular Black Book Publishers, 1900—1986
Chapter 10. Becoming Noncanonical
Chapter 11. The Book-of-the-Month Club and the General Reader
Chapter 12. Literacy and Mass Media
Contributors

Über Autor(innen)

Davidson, Cathy N.
Cathy N. Davidson is professor of English at Duke University. She is the author of the award-winning Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America and The Experimental Fictions of Ambrose Bierce: Structuring the Ineffable.