Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-century England

Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-century England PDF Author: Isabel Rivers
Publisher: Burns & Oates
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
This collection of essays investigates ways in which significant kinds of 18th century-writings were designed and received by different audiences. It focuses on research in publishing history since the 1980s.

Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England

Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England PDF Author: Jan Fergus
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191538205
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Many scholars have written about eighteenth-century English novels, but no one really knows who read them. This study provides historical data on the provincial reading publics for various forms of fiction - novels, plays, chapbooks, children's books, and magazines. Archival records of Midland booksellers based in five market towns and selling printed matter to over thirty-three hundred customers between 1744 and 1807 form the basis for new information about who actually bought and borrowed different kinds of fiction in eighteenth-century provincial England. This book thus offers the first solid demographic information about actual readership in eighteenth-century provincial England, not only about the class, profession, age, and sex of readers but also about the market of available fiction from which they made their choices - and some speculation about why they made the choices they did. Contrary to received ideas, men in the provinces were the principal customers for eighteenth-century novels, including those written by women. Provincial customers preferred to buy rather than borrow fiction, and women preferred plays and novels written by women - women's works would have done better had women been the principal consumers. That is, demand for fiction (written by both men and women) was about equal for the first five years, but afterward the demand for women's works declined. Both men and women preferred novels with identifiable authors to anonymous ones, however, and both boys and men were able to cross gender lines in their reading. Goody Two-Shoes was one of the more popular children's books among Rugby schoolboys, and men read the Lady's Magazine. These and other findings will alter the way scholars look at the fiction of the period, the questions asked, and the histories told of it.

Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-century England

Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-century England PDF Author: Isabel Rivers
Publisher: Burns & Oates
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
This collection of essays investigates ways in which significant kinds of 18th century-writings were designed and received by different audiences. It focuses on research in publishing history since the 1980s.

Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England

Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England PDF Author: Hal Gladfelder
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801866081
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
These narratives of violence, theft, disruptive sexuality, and rebellion compelled their readers to sort through fragmentary or contested evidence, anticipating the openness to discordant meanings and discrepant points of view which characterize the later fictions of Defoe and Fielding."--BOOK JACKET.

Books and Their Readers in 18th Century England

Books and Their Readers in 18th Century England PDF Author: Isabel Rivers
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1847144004
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
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.

The Social Life of Books

The Social Life of Books PDF Author: Abigail Williams
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300228104
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
“A lively survey…her research and insights make us conscious of how we, today, use books.”—John Sutherland, The New York Times Book Review Two centuries before the advent of radio, television, and motion pictures, books were a cherished form of popular entertainment and an integral component of domestic social life. In this fascinating and vivid history, Abigail Williams explores the ways in which shared reading shaped the lives and literary culture of the eighteenth century, offering new perspectives on how books have been used by their readers, and the part they have played in middle-class homes and families. Drawing on marginalia, letters and diaries, library catalogues, elocution manuals, subscription lists, and more, Williams offers fresh and fascinating insights into reading, performance, and the history of middle-class home life. “Williams’s charming pageant of anecdotes…conjures a world strikingly different from our own but surprisingly similar in many ways, a time when reading was on the rise and whole worlds sprang up around it.”—TheWashington Post

The Practice and Representation of Reading in England

The Practice and Representation of Reading in England PDF Author: James Raven
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521023238
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
This collection of fourteen essays highlights both the singularity of personal reading experiences and the cultural conventions involved in reading and its perception.

Chap-books of the Eighteenth Century

Chap-books of the Eighteenth Century PDF Author: John Ashton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Chapbooks
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Book Description


Eighteenth-Century Manners of Reading

Eighteenth-Century Manners of Reading PDF Author: Eve Tavor Bannet
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108321496
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
The market for print steadily expanded throughout the eighteenth-century Atlantic world thanks to printers' efforts to ensure that ordinary people knew how to read and use printed matter. Reading is and was a collection of practices, performed in diverse, but always very specific ways. These practices were spread down the social hierarchy through printed guides. Eve Tavor Bannet explores guides to six manners or methods of reading, each with its own social, economic, commercial, intellectual and pedagogical functions, and each promoting a variety of fragmentary and discontinuous reading practices. The increasingly widespread production of periodicals, pamphlets, prefaces, conduct books, conversation-pieces and fictions, together with schoolbooks designed for adults and children, disseminated all that people of all ages and ranks might need or wish to know about reading, and prepared them for new jobs and roles both in Britain and America.

The Secret Life of Things

The Secret Life of Things PDF Author: Mark Blackwell
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838756669
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
This collection enriches and complicates the history of prose fiction between Richardson and Fielding at mid-century and Austen at the turn of the century by focusing on it-narratives, a once popular form largely forgotten by readers and critics alike. The volume also advances important work on eighteenth-century consumer culture and the theory of things. The essays that comprise The Secret Life of Things thus bring new texts, and new ways of thinking about familiar ones, to our notice. Those essays range from the role of it-narratives in period debates about copyright to their complex relationship with object-riddled sentimental fictions, from anti-semitism in Chrysal to jingoistic imperialism in The Adventures of a Rupee, from the it-narrative as a variety of whore's biography to a consideration of its contributions to an emergent middle-class ideology.

The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Opera

The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Opera PDF Author: Anthony R. DelDonna
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521873584
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
The perfect accompaniment to courses on eighteenth-century opera for both students and teachers, this Companion is a definitive reference resource.