Table Of ContentREADING IN HISTORY:
NEW METHODOLOGIES FROM THE
ANGLO-AMERICAN TRADITION
The History of the Book
Series Editor: Ann R. Hawkins
Titles in this Series
1 Conservatism and the Quarterly Review: A Critical Analysis
Jonathan Cutmore (ed.)
2 Contributors to the Quarterly Review: A History, 1809–1825
Jonathan Cutmore
3 Wilkie Collins’s American Tour, 1873–1874
Susan R. Hanes
4 William Blake and the Art of Engraving
Mei-Ying Sung
5 Charles Lamb, Elia and the London Magazine: Metropolitan Muse
Simon P. Hull
Forthcoming Titles
On Paper: Th e Description and Analysis of Handmade Laid Paper
R. Carter Hailey
Middle-Class Writing in Late Medieval London
Malcolm Richardson
Elizabeth Inchbald’s Reputation: A Publishing and Reception History
Ben P. Robertson
www.pickeringchatto.co.uk/HoB
READING IN HISTORY:
NEW METHODOLOGIES FROM THE
ANGLO-AMERICAN TRADITION
edited by
Bonnie Gunzenhauser
london
PICKERING & CHATTO
2010
Published by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited
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All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise
without prior permission of the publisher.
© Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Ltd 2010
© Bonnie Gunzenhauser 2010
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Reading in history: new methodologies from the Anglo-American tradition.
– (Th e history of the book)
1. Books and reading – History.
I. Series II. Gunzenhauser, Bonnie.
028.9-dc22
ISBN-13: 9781851966288
e: 9781851966868
∞
Th is publication is printed on acid-free paper that conforms to the American
National Standard for the Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials.
Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited
Printed in the United Kingdom at MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vi
List of Contributors vii
Introduction – Bonnie Gunzenhauser 1
Section I: Artefactual Methodologies
1 On the Use of Anecdotal Evidence in Reception Study and the
History of Reading – Daniel Allington 11
2 Examining the Evidence of Reading: Th ree Examples from the
Reading Experience Database, 1450–1945 – Rosalind Crone, Katie
Halsey and Shafquat Towheed 29
3 Historical Dictionaries and the History of Reading – Michael Adams 47
Section II: Paratextual Methodologies
4 Reading and the Visual Dimensions of the Book: Th e Popular Cold
War Fictions of Helen MacInnes – Nicole Matthews 63
5 Th e Work of Abridgements: Readers, Editors and Expectations –
Jennifer Snead 77
Section III: Institutional Methodologies
6 Women Reading Shakespeare in the Outpost: Rural Reading Groups,
Literary Culture and Civic Life in America – Katherine Scheil 91
7 Turning Libraries into Public Works: Funding Arguments on the
Local Level in Wilkes-Barre and Scranton, Pennsylvania –
Catherine Turner 101
8 Explicating Explications: Researching Contemporary Reading –
Anouk Lang 119
Notes 135
Works Cited 159
Index 177
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Th is project had its origins in a set of conference panels at the 2004 meeting of
the Midwest Modern Language Association, and evolved over the years thanks
to discussions with many colleagues both far and near, and with my students at
Roosevelt University. Along the way I have incurred a number of more specifi c
debts: to Stephen Behrendt, Mike Goode, Tricia Matthew, Nicole Reynolds,
Anne Stevens and the other participants in our 2005 NEH summer seminar, for
their stimulating conversation; to Ann Hawkins, for her vision and wise counsel;
to Meg Seth, my research assistant, for her invaluable, cheerful and meticulous
assistance with the endgame of this book; and to Lynn Weiner, Dean of the Col-
lege of Arts and Sciences at Roosevelt University, for fi nancial and moral support
for this project. My oldest and deepest debt is to the people who brought reading
(and so much more) to my own personal history – my parents, Keith and Kath-
leen Gunzenhauser. Th is book is for them.
– vi –
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Michael Adams is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies
in the Department of English Language and Literature at Indiana University
in Bloomington, Indiana. He is the author of Slayer Slang: A Buff y the Vampire
Slayer Lexicon (2003) and Slang: Th e People’s Poetry (2009), and co-author of
How English Works: A Linguistic Introduction, 2nd edn (2009). Formerly editor
of Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America, he is currently
editor of the quarterly journal American Speech. He has published many arti-
cles on lexicography, including the chapter on ‘Th e Period Dictionaries’ in Th e
Oxford History of English Lexicography, ed. A. P. Cowie (2008).
Daniel Allington is Lecturer in English Language Studies and Applied Linguis-
tics at the Open University (UK). He is the author of a number of articles and
chapters on reader and reception study, and was lead editor of a special issue of
Language and Literature on the topic ‘Literary Reading as Social Practice’ (2009).
He is on the advisory board of the Reading Experience Database, and is currently
writing textbook chapters that approach language study from the perspective of
book and media history.
Rosalind Crone is Lecturer in History at the Open University (UK). She was
formerly an AHRC postdoctoral fellow on the Reading Experience Database
(RED), 1450–1945. She has published a number of articles on Victorian popu-
lar culture, the history of reading and the relationship between education and
crime in nineteenth-century England, and is currently completing a monograph
entitled Violent Entertainments in Nineteenth-Century London.
Bonnie Gunzenhauser is Associate Professor of English at Roosevelt University,
Illinois. Her research focuses on the intersections of reading and civic activism
in the British Romantic period, and her work has appeared in such journals as
Prose Studies, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Keats-Shelley Journal, Journal of Brit-
ish Studies and Modern Philology. She is currently at work on a monograph titled
Reading, Genre, and Political Identity in Romantic-Era Britain.
– vii –
viii Reading in History
Katie Halsey is Lecturer in English at the . She is the author
of Jane Austen and her Readers (forthcoming) and has published a number of
articles on nineteenth-century literary and print culture. With Shafquat Tow-
heed and Rosalind Crone, she is the editor of Th e History of Reading: A Reader
(forthcoming 2010), and with Bob Owens, the editor of Th e History of Reading:
Th e British Isles, 1750–1950 (forthcoming 2011). She is also the editor of the
Cambridge Scholars Publishing edition of the Complete Works of Jane Austen
(2008).
Anouk Lang holds an honorary research fellowship in the School of English,
Drama and American and Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham,
where she was part of the international research team on the AHRC-funded
project Beyond the Book: Contemporary Cultures of Reading in the UK, the US and
Canada. She has published articles in Narrative, Language and Literature, Journal
of Commonwealth Literature, Topia and Australian Literary Studies, and is cur-
rently working on a monograph on Australian and Canadian literary modernism.
Nicole Matthews lectures in the Department of Media, Music and Cultural
Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney. Her work on popular genres of fi lm,
television and print include Comic Politics: Gender in Hollywood Comedy aft er
the New Right (2000) and, with Nickianne Moody, Judging a Book by its Cover:
Fans, Publishers, Designers and the Marketing of Fiction (2007). She has also pub-
lished around autobiographical television, on media and disability, and around
learning and teaching in higher education. Her current research interests focus
on the relationship between life narratives, new media and inclusion.
Katherine Scheil completed her MA and PhD at the University of Toronto and
is Associate Professor of English at the University of Minnesota. Her fi rst book,
Th e Taste of the Town: Shakespearian Comedy and the Early Eighteenth-Cen-
tury Th eater (2003), explored the theatrical context behind eighteenth-century
adaptations of Shakespeare’s comedies. She is currently completing a book on
women’s reading groups of Shakespeare in nineteenth- and twentieth-century
America, and starting a new project on the aft erlife of Anne Hathaway.
Jennifer Snead is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Texas
Tech University, where she teaches courses in eighteenth-century British litera-
ture, bibliography and the history of the book. Her primary areas of research
include eighteenth-century transatlantic evangelicalism, concepts of seculari-
zation, book history and the history of reading. She has published articles on
these topics and on Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, John Wesley and George
Whitefi eld. She is currently completing a book, Responsible Readers: Early Meth-
odism and Popular Literacy.
List of Contributors ix
Shafquat Towheed is Lecturer in English at the Open University, and project
supervisor for Th e Reading Experience Database, 1450–1945 (http://www.
open.ac.uk/Arts/RED/). He is editor of Th e Correspondence of Edith Wharton
and Macmillan, 1901–1930 (2007) and of the new Broadview Literary Edition
of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Th e Sign of Four (2010). He is co-editor of Th e His-
tory of Reading: A Reader (forthcoming, 2010), Th e History of Reading, Vol. 1:
International Perspectives, c. 1500–1990 (forthcoming, 2011) and of Th e History
of Reading, Vol. 3: Methods, Strategies, Tactics (forthcoming, 2011). He writes
extensively on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature and cul-
ture, and is currently writing a study on Vernon Lee’s reading.
Catherine Turner is currently the Associate Director of the Center for Teaching
and Learning and teaches in the English department at the University of Penn-
sylvania, Philadelphia. She is the author of Marketing Modernism between the
Two Wars (2003) and has edited, with Greg Barnhisel, Pressing the Fight: Print
Culture in the Cold War (2010). Her current research examines the intersections
among the publishing industry, literacy programmes and public policy during
the 1920s and 1930s.
