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• Introduction
• 1. Reading at different ages
• 2. Favourite books Endpiece: Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton
• 3. Periodical reading Endpiece: Teenage magazines
• 4. Boy's and Girls' reading Endpiece: gender, reading development and school
• 5. The influence of family background
• 6. Children's reading habits
• 7. Television, computer use and reading
• 8. Changes in children's reading habits over time Endpiece: questions of quality and children's reading development
• Appendix 1 The questionnaire
• Appendix 2 Project procedures
• Appendix 3 Categories and coding
• Appendix 4 The interview schedule.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Children's Reading Choices discusses the reading habits of children aged between 10 and 14. The book reports the findings of the Children's Reading Choices project - conducted by the authors from the University of Nottingham and the largest national survey of children's reading choices since the 1970s. The book includes reports and discussion on: * girls' and boys' reading preferences and the differences between their reading habits * the place of series books, teenage magazines and comics in children's reading * the most popular authors and titles at different ages * purchasing habits and library use.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• A secret world? - children's response to literature-- reflections of real life - the ethos of schools-- deliberate appeals - the case of Herbert Strang-- formative years - the novels of Percy Westerman-- the perfect world of Enid Blyton-- sense and sensuality - from Angela Brazil to "Point Romance"-- political correctness and the subversive - Judy Blume-- the exuberant uncorrectness of Roald Dahl-- the attractions of escape - comics-- preparation for the adult world? - from "Point Horror" to Stephen King-- developing children's tastes in literature.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

A study of children's authors who are typical of their time, such as Enid Blyton, Angela Brazil, Judy Blume and Roald Dahl. The book discusses comics as well as "classic" texts, and the possible effects of these materials on children's attitudes.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Aron, Foreword. Introduction: The Kabbalah. Transformation. The Interpretive Encounter. Faith as the Fulcrum of Change. The Transformation of Evil. Epilogue: Jacob's Ladder.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Series Editor's Foreword Acknowledgments Introduction: "Points of intersection ... " "The Influence of Childhood Reading" Betty Greenway
• Part 1: "To drift in the currents of my unconscious ... "
• 1. A Child's-Eye Reading of Mark Twain--Madison Smartt Bell
• Part 2: "The place was full of books ... "
• 2. Borges and Georgie: Childhood Reading, Adult Writing, and the Shape of the Latin American Fantastic--Kimberly A. Nance
• 3. A Lonely Impulse of Delight: One Reader's Childhood--Dana Gioia
• 4. All the Stuff--Antonya Nelson
• 5. Taking Flight: A Retrospect on Booking Passage--Ira Sadoff
• 6. Bad Habits--Lee K. Abbott
• Part 3 "Wake me up in Wonderland and Whoville and Oz ... "
• 7. A Writer on the Yellow Brick Road: Salman Rushdie's Ozian Inspirations--Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak
• 8. The Pudding, the Witch, and the Titan--Sabina Murray
• 9. Fantastic Fellow-Travelers--X. J. Kennedy
• Part 4 "The essential eternal stories ... "
• 10. "Grains of Truth in the Wildest Fable": "Beauty and the Beast" Retold as Jane Eyre--Christine Butterworth-McDermott
• 11. Pictures First--Barry Unsworth
• 12. Essential and Eternal--Penelope Lively
• 13. Silver Chief--John McPhee
• Part 5 "Whose echoes seem ineradicable ... "
• 14. Higgledy Piggledy, Gobbledygoo: The Rotted Residue of Nursery Rhyme in Sylvia Plath's Poetry--Luanne Castle
• 15. Corrupting Children--W. D. Snodgrass
• 16. Cuentos--Rudolfo Anaya
• 17. Ineradicable Echoes--Charles Wright
• Part 6 "The luminous symbol of innocence ... "
• 18. "Wonders Wild and New": Lewis Carroll's Alice Books and Postmodern Women Writers--Carolyn Sigler
• 19. Dreamhouse Revisited - Alison Habens
• Part 7 "An impossible idealism ... "
• 20. Mapping the Soupsweet Land: King Solomon's Mines in Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter--Hope Howell Hodgkins
• 21. Sheba's Breasts--D. M. Thomas
• 22. E. Nesbit and Primrose Cumming--Maxine Kumin
• Part 8 "Recuperated loss ... "
• 23. Punch Reads Aunt Judy: Kipling, Ewing, and the Uses of Children's Literature--Judith A. Plotz
• 24. Three Men in a Boat--Andrei Codrescu
• 25. Cowboys and Poets--C. K. Williams
• Part 9 "I could become a writer too ... "
• 26. Transmutations of Folktale and School Story in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man--Jacqueline L. Gmuca
• 27. Dear Jade Snow--Maxine Hong Kingston
• Part 10 "To wash up on another island of truth ... "
• 28. From the Salty Unconscious of the Sea--Sandra Alcosser Contributors' Notes Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

"It is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives"--Graham Greene "The luminous books of our childhood will remain the luminous books of our lives."--Joyce Carol Oates Writers, as they often attest, are deeply influenced by their childhood reading. Salman Rushdie, for example, has said that The Wizard of Oz "made a writer of me." Twice-Told Tales is a collection of essays on the way the works of adult writers have been influenced by their childhood reading. This fascinating volume includes theoretical essays on Salman Rushdie and the Oz books, "Beauty and the Beast" retold as Jane Eyre, the childhood reading of Jorge Luis Borges, and the remnants of nursery rhymes in Sylvia Plath's poetry. It is supplemented with a number of brief commentaries on children's books by major creative writers, including Maxine Hong Kingston and Maxine Kumin.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)
First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction - towards developing dialogues among reading theorists and teachers-- three models of reading-- text, reader, ideology-- interchapter - two epiphanies-- reading to write - the cultural imperatives underlying cognitive acts-- on a topic of your own choosing and with a clear position of your own, use at least seven unbiased, accurate, and authoritative sources to write a balanced and objective paper that gives a complete picture of the subject you are investigating-- critically literate reading and writing in practice - moving from response statements to collaborative projects to formal essays-- always already theorists - literary theory and theorizing in the undergraduate curriculum. Appendices: reading-to-write assignment on time management-- interview questions for students-- students' reactions to contradictions.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

"The Culture of Reading and the Teaching of English" aims to do for contemporary literary and cultural theory what I.A. Richard's "Practical Criticism" did for literary formalism. Kathleen McCormick analyzes current approaches to reading theory and the teaching of literary and related cultural texts. She moves beyond "theory", with its tendency to become arcane and elitest, and instead examines the "cultures" of reading - its ideologies, institutions and classroom practices. She presents cognitive, expressivist and culturally-based approaches to reading, and then considers a variety of institutional and classroom practices from the writing of formal essays to the use of textbooks. This represents a crucial intervention in debates around the reformation of new curricula in schools and the "politically correct" classroom currently raging in both Britain and America. "The Culture of Reading" is much more than a classroom-oriented approach to contemporary literary and cultural theory. Through accounts of teaching experiences, student writing, professional conferences and curriculum battles on both sides of the Atlantic, she tells an often personal, frequently amusing account of the discoveries of one teacher - herself a widely published critic, writer and lecturer - as she finds how theory is mediated in very different institutions, social contexts and classroom situations.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

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• 1. A desire for singularity
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• 2. Mutual improvement
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• 3. The difference between fact and fiction
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• 4. A conservative canon
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• 5. Willingly to school
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• 6. Cultural literacy in the classic slum
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• 7. The Welsh miners' libraries
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• 8. The whole contention concerning the workers' educational association
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• 9. Alienation from Marxism
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• 10. The world unvisited
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• 11. A mongrel library
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• 12. What was Leonard Bast really like?
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• 13. Down and out in Bloomsbury.

Which books did the British working classes read - and how did they read them? How did they respond to canonical authors, penny dreadfuls, classical music, school stories, Shakespeare, Marx, Hollywood movies, imperialist propaganda, the Bible, the BBC, the Bloomsbury Group? What was the quality of their classroom education, as they experienced it? How did they educate themselves? What was their level of cultural literacy? How much did they know about politics, science, history, philosophy, poetry, and sexuality? Who were the proletarain intellectuals, and why did they pursue the life of the mind? These questions are addressed in this book.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Between about 1830 and the outbreak of the First World War, print culture, reading, and writing transformed cultural life in Western Europe in many significant ways. Book production and consumption increased dramatically, and practices such as letter- and diary-writing were widespread. This study demonstrates the importance of the nineteenth century in French cultural change and illustrates the changing priorities and concerns of l'histoire du livre since the 1970s. From the 1830s on, book production experienced an industrial revolution which led to the emergence of a mass literary culture by the close of the century. At the same time, the western world acquired mass literacy. New categories of readers became part of the reading public while western society also learned to write. Reading Culture and Writing Practices in Nineteenth-Century France examines how the concerns of historians have shifted from a search for statistical sources to more qualitative assessments of readers' responses. Martyn Lyons argues that autobiographical sources are vitally important to this investigation and he considers examples of the intimate and everyday writings of ordinary people. Featuring original and intriguing insights as well as references to material hitherto inaccessible to English readers, this study presents a form of 'history from below' with emphasis on the individual reader and writer, and his or her experiences and perceptions.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Foreword List of illustrations List of abbreviations and archive names I. Historical research on reading and writing: from book ownership to the use of media II. Mirror of literacy: reading and writing in the diary (1624) of David Beck III. Aristocratic literacy: Pieter Teding van Berkhout and his `journal' (1669-1712) IV. Aural and eyewitness testimony: reading, writing, and discussions of current affairs in Jan de Boer's chronological journal (1747-1758) V. A devout reader and writer: literacy in Jacoba van Thiel's `account-book of the soul' (1767-1770) VI. Literacy in everyday life
• Appendix I: Reading behaviour in figures
• Appendix II: Titles of books mentioned in the diaries List of sources Bibliography Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Until recently, historians of reading have concentrated on book ownership and trying to map out a history of who read what. The reading experience has been a subject more difficult to research. As has been pointed out before, egodocuments can be valuable sources in this case. Following this lead, Literacy in Everyday Life focuses upon four early modern Dutch diaries in which readers document their daily life and in which they recount their reading. In the analysis, other ways in which these four readers communicated are also addressed, especially speech and writing. This book therefore provides an insight into the possible uses of literacy and the interaction between the printed, written and spoken word in the early modern Dutch Republic.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• I. THE READING WORLD. Back to the future: authors at the movies
• Consenting and dissenting bibliophiles in public and private
• Literary advice and advisers
• Reviews and reviewers
• The great tradition
• The commemoration movement
• English literature's foreign relations; or E dunno ou il est!. II. WRITERS AND THE PUBLIC: the price of fame. Product advertising and self-advertising
• The star turn
• Playing the press: entry and exposure
• Securing the future
• Titles and laurels
• Social prestige and clubbability
• The artistocratic round and salon circle
• Looking and acting the part
• Lecture tours
• Literary properties and agencies. III. BEST SELLERS. Market conditions
• In cupid's chains: Charles Garvice
• Hymns and heroines: Florence Barclay
• The epic ego: Hall Caine
• The demonic dreamer: Marie Corelli
• Authors at play: Nat Gould leads the field. IV. WRITERS AND THE PUBLIC: PENMEN AS PUNDITS. The campaign trail
• Public service and party politics
• Pens at war
• Pricking censorship
• Theology versus sociology and psychology.

Charles Dickens died in 1870, the same year in which universal elementary education was introduced. During the following generation a mass reading public emerged, and the term 'best-seller' was coined. In new and cheap editions Dickens's stories sold hugely, but these were progressively outstripped in quantity by the likes of Hall Caine and Marie Corelli, Charles Garvice and Nat Gould. Who has now heard of these writers? Yet Hall Caine, for one, boasted of having made more money from his pen than any previous author. This book presents a panoramic view of literary life in Britain over half a century from 1870 to 1914, teasing out authors' relations with the reading public and tracing how reputations were made and unmade. It surveys readers' habits, the book trade, popular literary magazines and the role of reviewers, and examines the construction of a classical canon by critics concerned about the supposed corruption of popular taste. Certain writers were elevated as national heroes, yet Britain drew its writers from abroad as well as from home. Authors became stars and celebrities, and a literary tourism grew around their haunts.; They advertised products from cigarettes to toothpaste; they were fashion-conscious and promoted themselves via profiles, interviews, and carefully posed photographs; they went on lecture tours to America; and their names were pushed by a new professional breed: the literary agent. Some angled for knighthoods, even peerages, and cut a figure in high society and London clubland. The debated public issues of the day and campaigned on all manner of things from questions of faith and women's rights to censorship and conscription. During the Great War they penned propaganda. Meanwhile the cinema was developing to challenge the supremacy of the written word over the imagination. Authors took to that too, as an opportunity for new adventure. Writers, Readers, and Reputations is richly entertaining and informative, amounting to a collective biography of a generation of writers and their world.

• Preface /
• 1. The book trades (James Raven, Mansfield College, Oxford) /
• 2. The Bible and its readers (Scott Mandelbrote, Peterhouse, Cambridge) /
• 3. Theological books from 'The Naked Gospel' to 'The Nemesis of Faith' (Brian Young, University of Sussex) /
• 4. The history market (Karen O'Brien, University of Warwick) /
• 5. Biographical dictionaries and their uses from Bayle to Chalmers (Isabel Rivers) /
• 6. Review journals and the reading public (Antonia Forster, University of Akron) /
• 7. Literary scholarship and the life of editing (Marcus Walsh, University of Birmingham) /
• 8. Poetry miscellanies (Michael Suarez, SJ, Fordham University / Bibliography / Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

This collection of eight new essays investigates ways in which significant kinds of 18th-century writings were designed and received by different audiences. Rivers explores the answers to certain crucial questions about the contemporary use of books. This new edition contains the results of important new research by well known specialists in the field of book and publishing history over the last two decades.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Reading and the ironies of technological innovation
• The publisher's market
• The book peddler and literary dissemination
• The transportation revolution and book distribution
• The railroad, the community, and the book
• Family, church, and academy
• The common school and other institutions
• The letter and the reading public
• Numeracy, the news, and self-culture
• The interior organization of a bookstore
• Gender and boundlessness in reading patterns
• Time, space, and chaos.

This book explodes two notions that are commonplace in cultural histories of the nineteenth century: first, that the spread of literature was a simple force for the democratization of taste, and second, that there was a body of nineteenth century literature that reflected `a nation of readers'. Zboray shows that the output of the press was so diverse and the public so indiscriminate in what it would read that these conclusions must be reassessed.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• List of illustrations-- List of contributors-- Acknowledgements-- Introduction: discovering the Renaissance reader Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker-- Part I. The Material Text:
• 1. Errata: print, politics, and poetry in early modern England Seth Lerer--
• 2. Abandoning the capital in eighteenth-century London Richard Wendorf-- Part II. Reading as Politics:
• 3. 'Boasting of silence': women readers and the patriarchal state Heidi Brayman Hackel--
• 4. Reading revelations: prophecy, hermeneutics and politics in early modern Britain Kevin Sharpe-- Part III. Print, Politics and Performance:
• 5. Performances and playbooks: the closing of the theatres and the politics of drama David Scott Kastan--
• 6. Irrational, impractical and unprofitable: reading the news in seventeenth-century Britain Joad Raymond-- Part IV. Reading Physiologies:
• 7. Reading bodies Michael Shoenfeldt--
• 8. Reading and experiment in the early Royal Society Adrian Johns-- Part V. Reading Texts in Time:
• 9. Martial, Jonson and the assertion of plagiarism Joseph Loewenstein--
• 10. The constitution of opinion and the pacification of reading Steven N. Zwicker--
• 11. Cato's retreat: fabula, historia and the question of constitutionalism in Mr Locke's anonymous Essay on Government Kirsie M. McClure-- Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

This book ranges over private and public reading, and over a variety of religious, social, and scientific communities to locate acts of reading in specific historical moments from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. It also charts the changes in reading habits that reflect broader social and political shifts during the period. A team of expert contributors cover topics including the processes of book production and distribution, audiences and markets, the material text, the relation of print to performance, and the politics of acts of reception. In addition, the volume emphasises the independence of early modern readers and their role in making meaning in an age in which increased literacy equaled social enfranchisement and interpretation was power. Meaning was not simply an authorial act but the work of many hands and processes, from editing, printing, and proofing, to reproducing, distributing, and finally reading.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: The Case of the Poisonous Book
• 2. Gothic Toxins: The Castle of Otranto, The Monk, and Caleb Williams
• 3. The Reading Monster
• 4. How Oliver Twist Learned to Read, and What He Found
• 5. Poor Jack, Poor Jane: Representing the Working Class and Women in Early and Mid-Victorian Novels
• 6. Cashing in on the Real in Thackeray and Trollope
• 7. Novel Sensations of the 1860s
• 8. The Educations of Edward Hyde and Edwin Reardon
• 9. Overbooked versus Bookless Futures in Late-Victorian Fiction Notes Works Cited Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

"Timely, scrupulously researched, thoroughly enlightening, and steadily readable...Here is a book about readers that is genuinely for readers...Brantlinger catches once again the pulse of recent Victorian studies...A work of agenda-setting historical scholarship." - Garrett Stewart, University of Iowa. Fear of the novel stalks the pages of Patrick Brantlinger's latest book. Its central plot involves the many ways in which novels and novel reading were viewed - especially by novelists themselves - as both causes and symptoms of rotting minds and moral decay among nineteenth century readers. The fear of mass literacy is a familiar theme in histories of the period. The guardians of middle class culture were alarmed by the mass literacy that brought with it a mass consumer market for such popular, supposedly low forms as Gothic romances, penny dreadfuls, and Newgate crime stories. Nor were their higher priced and higher brow cousins, the three-decker novels, immune from concern: after Zola, "serious" realistic novels were no longer thought to be a palliative for the excesses of romance and crime fiction. Brantlinger demonstrates how these attitudes were shared in various ways by Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, Collins, Gissing, Stevenson, and others, who echoed the suspicion of their audiences about the negative consequences of reading. Brantlinger sets the scene with discussions of the Gothic romance and other "poisonous fictions" and of the anxieties about democracy and the mob during and after the French Revolution. Among other examples, he analyzes M. G. Lewis's "The Monk", William Godwin's "Caleb Williams", and the surprising literacy of the monster in Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein". He then explores respectable vs. criminal reading in Dickens's "Oliver Twist" and Henry Mayhew's "London Labour and the London Poor"; representations of the working class in novels by Harriet Martineau, Charles Kingsley, George Eliot, and Charlotte and Emily Bronte; counterfeit money as a metaphor for realism and the novel in the realistic novels of Thackeray and Trollope; and the "moral panic" caused by the Sensation Novels of the 1860s. He closes with studies of the conflict between respectable and mass or low culture played out in Robert Louis Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" and George Gissing's "New Grub Street" and of "overbooked vs. bookless futures" in William Morris's "News From Nowhere" and H.G. Wells's "The Time Machine".
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Self, culture, and self-culture in America
• The "higher journalism" realigned : Stuart Pratt Sherman, Irita Van Doren, and Books
• Why do you disappoint yourself? : the early history of the Book-of-the-Month Club
• Classics and commercials : John Erskine and "great books"
• Merchant of light : Will Durant and the vogue of the "outline"
• Information, please! : book programs on commercial radio.

The proliferation of book clubs, reading groups, "outline" volumes, and new forms of book reviewing in the first half of the twentieth century influenced the tastes and pastimes of millions of Americans. Joan Rubin here provides the first comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon, the rise of American middlebrow culture, and the values encompassed by it. Rubin centers her discussion on five important expressions of the middlebrow: the founding of the Book-of-the-Month Club; the beginnings of "great books" programs; the creation of the New York Herald Tribune's book-review section; the popularity of such works as Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy; and the emergence of literary radio programs. She also investigates the lives and expectations of the individuals who shaped these middlebrow institutions--such figures as Stuart Pratt Sherman, Irita Van Doren, Henry Seidel Canby, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, John Erskine, William Lyon Phelps, Alexander Woollcott, and Clifton Fadiman. Moreover, as she pursues the significance of these cultural intermediaries who connected elites and the masses by interpreting ideas to the public, Rubin forces a reconsideration of the boundary between high culture and popular sensibility.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)