Description
Book SynopsisIn the nineteenth century, the reading public expanded to embrace new categories of consumers, especially of cheap fiction. The study focuses on workers, women and peasants, and the ways in which their reading was constructed as a social and political problem, to analyse the fear of reading in nineteenth century France.
Trade Review'Martyn Lyons recalls for us the importance of understanding the fragility of lives, the dreams or sufferings of men and women of the past, and the respect we have to pay to the dead souls. The book is well crafted, written with sensitivity and humour, raising historical issues and intellectual questions which are not at all confined to nineteenth-century France.' - Roger Chartier
'...Readers and Society in Nineteenth-Century France is a valuable contribution, and it deserves a wide audience of French historians.' - H-France Book Reviews
'...a valuable contribution to its field...' - James Smith Allen, Libraries & Culture
Table of ContentsIntroduction The New Readers of Nineteenth-Century France Reading Workers: Libraries for the People Reading Workers: Improvisation and Resistance Reading Women: From Emma Bovary to the New Woman Reading Women: Defining a Space of Her Own Reading Peasants: The Pragmatic Uses of the Written Word Reading Classes and Dangerous Classes Appendix A: Popular Uses of the Book in Early Twentieth-Century France Appendix B: Thirty Works for Peasant Readers Bibliography Index
