Description
Book SynopsisAn Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.
Steel City Readers* makes available, and interprets in detail, a large body of new evidence about past cultures and communities of reading. Its distinctive method is to listen to readers' own voices, rather than theorising about them as an undifferentiated group. Its cogent and engaging structure traces reading journeys from childhood into education and adulthood, and attends to settings from home to school to library. It has a distinctive focus on reading for pleasure and its framework of argument situates that type of reading in relation to dimensions of gender and class. It is grounded in place, and particularly in the context of a specific industrial city: Sheffield. The men and women featured in the book, coming to adulthood in the 1930s and 1940s, rarely regarded reading as a means of self-improvement. It was more usually a compulsive and intensely pleasurable private activity.
Trade Review\‘This is a fascinating and important study. It will be a rich and rare resource. Mary Grover has done a superb job illuminating the meaning of reading in individual lives as well as giving us insights into the local and national contexts.\’ - Alison Light, author of Common People: The History of an English Family
‘Steel City Readers provides an excellent opportunity to appreciate the power of reading and the changes reading for pleasure brings to a community and its literary legacies.’ - The Sheffield Telegraph
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Reading, ‘I saw no living in it’1. At Home with Books2. Running up Eyre Street: Independent Young Readers and the Public Libraries3. Hefty Books and Tuppenny Weeklies4. Reading Scenes: Cultural Networks and Reading5. ‘Getting them Learned’: Books in the Classroom6. The 1937 ‘Confession’ Book of Mary Wilkinson: Reading and the Second World War7. ‘You can read and dance’: Marriage, Work and Play8. ‘Anna Karenina, you know, and all the normal things’: Sheffield Readers, Classics and the ContemporaryThe Last Word
