Description
Book SynopsisExploring six methods of reading in their social, economic, commercial, intellectual and pedagogical context, Eve Tavor Bannet demonstrates how guides to reading showed people of all ranks how to read and use periodicals and books, preparing them for new jobs and new roles in Britain, America and the Atlantic world.
Trade Review'… a valuable book in its wide-ranging knowledge, its identification of new ways to think about eighteenth-century reading practices, and its new configurations of material from disparate disciplines and arenas.' Min Wild, The Times Literary Supplement
'Bannet explores the ways in which 18th-century printers and print material offered instructions and models for ways of reading to ordinary people, thus creating the conditions for a widespread print and reading culture. Recommended.' Choice
'The book is a fascinating Shakespearean mousetrap of its own method. It can absolutely be read discontinuously, based on a reader's individual interests, without compromising its overarching narrative or historical argument.' Nora Slonimsky, The William and Mary Quarterly
'… occasionally surprising and undeniably satisfying.' Aileen Douglas, The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats
'In five illuminating and subtle chapters, Eve Tavor Bannet recovers six differently defined (but fascinatingly interdependent) 'manners' of reading, greatly refining our understanding of prevailing reading perceptions, prescriptions, and presumptions. She convincingly presents these manners of reading as multiple strategies effectively to connect and reassociate the separateness (or, as she puts it, discontinuities and disconnections) of myriad texts, words, and letters.' James Raven, Eighteenth-Century Fiction
Table of ContentsIntroduction: the schoolroom in the marketplace; 1. The ABCs of reading; 2. Arts of reading; 3. Polite reading; 4. Ordinary discontinuous reading; 5. Reading secret writing.
