Abstract
Bringing together scholarship on reading communities that traverses three centuries and numerous cultural contexts, the chapters collected in Reading Communities from Salons to Cyberspace illustrate the cross-disciplinary nature of scholarship in the history of reading. In its own way, each of the pieces in this book addresses Davidson’s call to reflect upon the private and social interactions that occur between texts and their readers. But while the collection as a whole incorporates the perspectives of authors working in a range of disciplines — and who, because of this, engage in a variety of research methods — a common thread runs through all these chapters: the assumption that shared reading is both a social process and a social formation. Each author conceives differently the social dimensions of reading. However, by locating reading communities in literary salons, author-reader relationships, face-to-face book clubs, television programmes, online chat rooms, and formal reading programmes designed by cultural authorities, the collection also acknowledges Price’s proposition by reconstructing sociable forms of reading.
In reconstructing sociable forms of reading, book historians make one reader knowable to another.
Leah Price1
Books cannot be understood apart from the society that creates them, and conversely, no literate society can be understood without some study of the book it produces.
Cathy N. Davidson2
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Notes
1. Leah Price, ‘Reading: the State of the Discipline’, Book History 7, 1 (2004): 310.
2. Cathy N. Davidson, ‘Towards a History of Books and Readers’, American Quarterly 40, 1 (1988): 15.
3. See in particular, Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1982); Davidson, ‘Towards a History of Books’; Davidson, Reading in America: Literature and Social History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); Davidson, Revolution and the Word: the Rise of the Novel in America, expanded edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Michael T. Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); William J. Gilmore-Lehne, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780–1835 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989); Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experience among Antebellum New Englanders (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006).
4. Madeleine Jeay, ed., Les Évangiles des quenouilles, cited in Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), 117. See also Kiernan, Chapter 6 below.
5. William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 254; Stephen Colclough, Consuming Texts: Readers and Reading Communities, 1695–1870 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
6. Jennifer Phegley, Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004).
7. Thomas Augst, ‘Introduction: American Libraries and Agencies of Culture’, in The Library as an Agency of Culture, ed. Thomas Augst and Wayne A. Wiegand (Lawrence, KS: American Studies, 2001), 5–22.
8. Kenneth M. Price and Susan Belasco Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Kenneth M. Price and Susan Belasco Smith (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 3–16; Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: a Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 73–123; Barbara Sicherman, Well-Read Lives: How Books Inspired a Generation of American Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 57–75; 79–108; 165–92.
9. Zboray and Saracino Zboray, Everyday Ideas, 129–31; Elizabeth McHenry, ‘“Dreaded Eloquence”: the Origins and Rise of African American Literary Societies and Libraries’, Harvard Library Review 6, 2 (1995): 32–56; Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies, New Americanists (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
10. General readership income is discussed in Jon P. Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).
11. Anne Ruggles Gere, Intimate Practices: Literacy and Cultural Work in U.S. Women’s Clubs, 1880–1920 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 5.
12. Barbara Sicherman, ‘Sense and Sensibility: a Case Study of Women’s Reading in Late-Victorian America’, in Reading in America, ed. Cathy Davison (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 209.
14. Barbara Sicherman, ‘Sense and Sensibility: a Case Study of Women’s Reading in Late-Victorian America’, in Reading in America, ed. Cathy Davison (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 209.
16. Heather Murray, ‘Great Works and Good Works: the Toronto Women’s Literary Club 1877–1883’, Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’Histoire de l’Education 11, 1 (1999): 75–95; Come, Bright Improvement! The Literary Societies of Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002).
17. Tahera Aftab, ‘Reform Societies and Women’s Education in Northern India in the Later 19th Century’, Journal of the Pakistan Historical Society, 35, 2 (1987): 121–35; P.J. Prinsloo, ‘Die Pietermaritzburgse Debat En Letterkundige Vereniging, 1908–1918’, Historia (South Africa), 40, 1 (1995): 75–95; Ericka Kim Verba, ‘The Circulo de Lectura de Senoras (Ladies’ Reading Circle) and the Club de Senoras (Ladies’ Club) of Santiago, Chile: Middle- and Upper-Class Feminist Conversations (1915–1920)’, Journal of Women’s History, 7, 3 (1995): 6–33.
20. Ellen Gruber Garvey, ‘The Power of Recirculation: Scrapbooks and the Reception of Nineteenth-Century Books’, in New Directions in American Reception Study, ed. Philip Goldstein and James L. Machor (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 211–31; Sarah A. Wadsworth, ‘Social Reading, Social Worth and the Social Function of Literacy in Louisa May Alcott’s “May Flowers”’, in Reading Women Literary Figures and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Present, ed. Jennifer Phegley and Janet Badia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 149–67. See also DeNel Rehberg Sedo, ‘Case Study: Margaret McMicking and the Victoria Literary Society’, in History of the Book in Canada, Vol. II, 1840–1918, ed. Yvan Lamonde, Patricia Lockhart Fleming and Fiona A. Black (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 479–81, along with Robert Snape’s chapter below on the National Home Reading Union, and Ruggles Gere’s chronicle of various literary societies in the United States, Intimate Practices.
21. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edn (London: Verso, 1991).
23. Jack Quarter, ‘James John Harpell: an Adult Education Pioneer’, Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education 14, 1 (2000): 89–112.
24. Rosabel Fast, The Impact of Sponsorship: the University of Manitoba’s Rural Adult Education Program, 1936–1945 (Edmonton: University of Alberta, 1991).
25. Jean L Preer, ‘Exploring the American Idea at the New York Public Library’, in The Library as an Agency of Culture, ed. Thomas Augst and Wayne A. Wiegand (Lawrence, KS: American Studies, 2001), 135–54.
28. Karen Joy Fowler, The Jane Austen Book Club (New York: Putnam, 2004); Elizabeth Noble, The Reading Group (New York: Perennial, 2005); Lorna Landvik, Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons (New York: Ballantine Books, 2003).
29. Kathy Griffin, Official Book Club Selection: a Memoir According to Kathy Griffin (New York: Ballantine Books, 2009).
30. See www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3041344/ and www.bcnews.go.com/GMA/ Books (accessed 2 December 2009).
32. See, for example, Karen Hellenkson and Kristina Busse, eds, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2006).
33. For a critique of the changing cultural hierarchy terrain, see Sven Birkets’s response to LitBlogs at www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/07/29/lost_in_the_blogosphere/?page=full (accessed 31 July 2007).
34. National Endowment for the Arts, NewsRoom, at www.nea.gov/news/news05/BigReadAnnounce.html (accessed 10 October 2009).
35. On the eve of his departure, Chairman Gioia and the NEA released the latest NEA report, ‘Reading on the Rise: a New Chapter in American Literacy’, claiming that reading novels, short stories, poems, or plays in print or online has increased nearly 4 per cent in four years. The brochure can be accessed at: www.arts.gov/research/ReadingonRise.pdf (accessed 31 January 2009).
36. Catherine Sheldrick Ross, Lynne (E.F.) McKechnie and Paulette M. Rothbauer, Reading Matters: What the Research Reveals about Reading, Libraries, and Community (Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2005), 23. For a clever and entertaining analysis of the Reading at Risk and its follow up study, see Leah Price, ‘You are What You Read’, New York Times Book Review, 23 December 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/books/review/Price-t.html?ref=review (accessed 4 October 2008).
37. The current list can be found at http://www.neabigread.org/ (accessed 23 December 2010).
38. See ‘Searching for good news about American literary culture’ at: www.beyondthebookproject.org/content_list.asp?itemtype=paper§ion=00010 00100060001&page=3 (accessed 3 January 2011).
39. R. Mark Hall, ‘The “Oprahfication” of Literacy: Reading “Oprah’s Book Club”’, College English 65, 6 (2003): 646–67; Kimberly Chabot Davis, ‘Oprah’s Book Club and the Politics of Cross-Racial Empathy’, International Journal of Cultural Studies 7, 4 (2004): 399–419; Cecilia Konchar Farr and Jaime Harker, eds, The Oprah Affect: Critical Essays on Oprah’s Book Club (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008); Konchar Farr, Reading Oprah: How Oprah’s Book Club Changed the Way America Reads (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005).
40. Jenny Hartley, Reading Groups (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
42. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Polity Press, 1993); Tony Bennett, Michael Emmison and John Frow, Accounting for Tastes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
46. Kimberly Chabot Davis, ‘White Book Clubs and African American Literature: the Promise and Limitations of Cross-Racial Empathy’, in LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 19, 2 (2008): 155–86.
48. Temma Berg, ‘“What do you Know?”; or, the Question of Reading in Groups and Academic Authority’, in LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 19, 2 (2008): 123–54.
50. Norma Linda González, ‘Nancy Drew: Girls’ Literature, Women’s Reading Groups, and the Transmission of Literacy’, Journal of Literacy Research 29, 2 (1997): 221–51.
53. Elizabeth Long, Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 34.
54. David W. McMillan and David M. Chavis, ‘Sense of Community: a Definition and Theory’, Journal of Community Psychology 14 (1986): 6–23; David W. McMillan, ‘Sense of Community’, Journal of Community Psychology 24, 4 (1996): 315–25.
56. Leslie Howsam, Old Books & New Histories: an Orientation to Studies in Book & Print Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006).
58. See James L. Machor, Readers in History: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Contexts of Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) and James L. Machor and Philip Goldstein Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 2001) for theorizing a new historicism in reading reception studies.
59. Robert Darnton, ‘What is the History of Books?’, in The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (New York: Norton, 1990). For a useful overview of Darnton’s model and the concerns it has raised, see Howsam, Old Books & New Histories, especially 29–48.
60. Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker, ‘A New Model for the Study of the Book’, in A Potencie of Life: Books in Society, ed. Nicolas Barker (London: British Library, 1993), 12.
61. Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
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© 2011 DeNel Rehberg Sedo
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Sedo, D.R. (2011). An Introduction to Reading Communities: Processes and Formations. In: Sedo, D.R. (eds) Reading Communities from Salons to Cyberspace. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230308848_1
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