Reading Communities from Salons to Cyberspace by Sedo, DeNel Rehberg -- Read -- Imperial Library of Trantor

Index

Reading Communities from Salons to Cyberspace

Contents List of Figures and Tables

Figures Tables

Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors An Introduction to Reading Communities: Processes and Formations

A brief historical introduction to shared reading Theorizing (reading) communities Crossing disciplinary boundaries in communal reading scholarship Notes

1 Reading in an Epistolary Community in Eighteenth-Century England

Women readers as writers and agents of culture Collective reading and the construction of a readerly identity Collective critical authority Negotiating fiction Bluestocking readers and the female author Notes

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

Notes

3 Reading Across the Empire: the National Home Reading Union Abroad

The National Home Reading Union Circles beyond the British Isles Methodological considerations Australia South Africa Canada Conclusion Notes

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

Birth of an idea The dialogue about Great Books: Socratic and Talmudic method Young man Adler: academic resentments as spur to action The Great Books experiment at the University of Chicago Twilight of the Great Books gods: Hutchins on the ramparts Notes

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

Introduction Cultural authority in text selection Politics, power, and discourse in TYABC Conclusion Notes

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

‘Official’ discourses and ‘the popular aesthetic’ The Oprah effect The Richard and Judy demographic The ‘ideal (or “writerly”) reader’ versus the reading group Conclusion Notes

7 Speaking Subjects: Developing Identities in Women’s Reading Communities

Introduction Relational ways of being Subjects-in-process Conclusion Notes

8 Leading Questions: Interpretative Guidelines in Contemporary Popular Reading Culture

Notes

9 Marionettes and Puppeteers? The Relationship between Book Club Readers and Publishers

Introduction Changing markets, changing marketing Book club choice Recommendation and commodification Conclusions Notes

Bibliography Index