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Author: Jan Fergus
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191538205
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 327
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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.
Author: Jan Fergus
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191538205
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 327
Get Book Here
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.
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.
Author: Jan S. Fergus
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 314
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Book Description
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.
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.
Author: Eve Tavor Bannet
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108317774
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 307
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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.
Author: Janet Sorensen
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400885167
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 349
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Book Description
How vocabularies once associated with outsiders became objects of fascination in eighteenth-century Britain While eighteenth-century efforts to standardize the English language have long been studied—from Samuel Johnson's Dictionary to grammar and elocution books of the period—less well-known are the era's popular collections of odd slang, criminal argots, provincial dialects, and nautical jargon. Strange Vernaculars delves into how these published works presented the supposed lexicons of the "common people" and traces the ways that these languages, once shunned and associated with outsiders, became objects of fascination in printed glossaries—from The New Canting Dictionary to Francis Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue—and in novels, poems, and songs, including works by Daniel Defoe, John Gay, Samuel Richardson, Robert Burns, and others. Janet Sorensen argues that the recognition and recovery of outsider languages was part of a transition in the eighteenth century from an aristocratic, exclusive body politic to a British national community based on the rhetoric of inclusion and liberty, as well as the revaluing of a common British past. These representations of the vernacular made room for the "common people" within national culture, but only after representing their language as "strange." Such strange and estranged languages, even or especially in their obscurity, came to be claimed as British, making for complex imaginings of the nation and those who composed it. Odd cant languages, witty slang phrases, provincial terms newly valued for their connection to British history, or nautical jargon repurposed for sentimental connections all toggle, in eighteenth-century jest books, novels, and poems, between the alluringly alien and familiarly British. Shedding new light on the history of the English language, Strange Vernaculars explores how eighteenth-century British literature transformed the patois attributed to those on the margins into living symbols of the nation. Examples of slang from Strange Vernaculars bum-boat woman: one who sells bread, cheese, greens, and liquor to sailors from a small boat alongside a ship collar day: execution day crewnting: groaning, like a grunting horse gentleman's companion: lice gingerbread-work: gilded carvings of a ship's bow and stern luggs: ears mort: a large amount thraw: to argue hotly and loudly
Author: D. R. Woolf
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521780469
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388
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Book Description
A study of writing, publishing and marketing history books in the early modern period.
Author: Mary Eagleton
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405183136
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 514
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Book Description
Now in its third edition, Feminist Literary Theory remains the most comprehensive, single volume introduction to a vital and diverse field Fully revised and updated to reflect changes in the field over the last decade Includes extracts from all the major critics, critical approaches and theoretical positions in contemporary feminist literary studies Features a new section, Writing 'Glocal', which covers feminism's dialogue with postcolonial, global and spatial studies Revised chapter introductions provide readers with helpful contextual information while extensive notes offer recommendations for further reading
Author: Jonathan Rose
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191035424
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 275
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Book Description
The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of 'the literary' has always been contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognised as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading. For the Internet and digitial generation, the most basic human right is the freedom to read. The Web has indeed brought about a rapid and far-reaching revolution in reading, making a limitless global pool of literature and information available to anyone with a computer. At the same time, however, the threats of censorship, surveillance, and mass manipulation through the media have grown apace. Some of the most important political battles of the twenty-first century have been fought--and will be fought--over the right to read. Will it be adequately protected by constitutional guarantees and freedom of information laws? Or will it be restricted by very wealthy individuals and very powerful institutions? And given increasingly sophisticated methods of publicity and propaganda, how much of what we read can we believe? This book surveys the history of independent sceptical reading, from antiquity to the present. It tells the stories of heroic efforts at self-education by disadvantaged people in all parts of the world. It analyzes successful reading promotion campaigns throughout history (concluding with Oprah Winfrey) and explains why they succeeded. It also explores some disturbing current trends, such as the reported decay of attentive reading, the disappearance of investigative journalism, 'fake news', the growth of censorship, and the pervasive influence of advertisers and publicists on the media--even on scientific publishing. For anyone who uses libraries and Internet to find out what the hell is going on, this book is a guide, an inspiration, and a warning.
