An Introduction to Reading Communities: Processes and Formations

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.KeywordsReading GroupBook HistoryBook ClubReading PracticeLiterary SocietyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.