Reading in America: Literature and Social History

by Cathy N. Davidson (Editor)

What is a book? Cathy N. Davidson brings together twelve distinguished authors to offer the first history of books in America from Puritan time to the present--and to introduce American readers to the exciting field of inquiry known in France as histoire du livre. Drawing on the methodologies of history, education, literary studies, ethnography, and bibliography, the authors explore subjects ranging from book production and publishing practices to the role books played in the lives of American women and men, minorities, workers, and immigrants.

Robert Darnton described the communications circuit that brings books from author to reader. Donald Lazere suggests America's one dimensional oral media threaten to render books irrelevant. In other revisionist essays, Barbara Sicherman discovers that reading practices of late-Victorian women contrdict rading-revolution theory; Janice A. Radway analyzes the selection process of the Book-of-the-month Club and the formation of middle-brow culture; and Victor Neuburg asks how we can understand the intellectual life of the poor when the books they read--eraly American chapbooks, for instance--no longer exist.

Genres: Nonfiction

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Cathy N. Davidson served from 1998 until 2006 as the first Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University, where she worked with faculty to help create many programs, including the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and the program in Information Science + Information Studies (ISIS). She is the co-founder of Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, HASTAC (haystack), a network of innovators dedicated to new forms of learning for the digital age. She is also co-director of the $2 million annual HASTAC/John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition. She has published more than twenty books, including Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory (with photographer Bill Bamberger) and The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age (with HASTAC co-founder David Theo Goldberg). She blogs regularly on new media, learning, and innovation on the www.hastac.org website as Cat in the Stack. She holds two distinguished Chaired Professorships at Duke University, the Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English and the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies. She has been awarded with Honorary Doctorates from Elmhurst College and Northwestern University."

Reviews

[Aspasia · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were only two essays that I enjoyed reading in this book: "Literacy Instruction and Gender in New England" and "Sense and Sensibility: A Case Study of Women's Reading in Late-Victorian America." The other essays were dry, scholarly, overly formal, and very boring.