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It is easy to find books and libraries within fiction from the earliest times onwards in works for all age groups, in canonical literature and in books that form part of popular culture. From Don Quixote to Louisa M. Alcott’s March girls and Terry Pratchett’s Unseen University wizards, the reading material of fictional personae is part of their characterisation; we are often reading readers. This volume breaks new ground in offering a chronological range of essays exploring the depiction of books, libraries and reading specifically in fiction from the medieval period to the present. Through detailed case studies from primarily British fiction that address common themes such as gender, genre and the relation between reading and writing itself, the collection examines the ways in which authors of fiction mediate and interpret books, libraries, and the act of reading to their own readers. Fiction enables writers to teach readers how to read, but it can also portray subversive acts of reading that engage with contemporary cultural anxieties or moral debates. The volume draws on approaches from literary studies, book history, library history, and theories and histories of reading, to examine what fictional representations of reading tell us about changing cultural attitudes to different reading practices, and the use (and abuse) of books beyond actual reading, both in the context of specific works and about the reception of books more widely.
This is a valuable and wide-ranging collection of essays which provides fascinating new insights into the topic of reading within fiction. I would recommend this book to literary scholars and historians of reading; it will be of interest to both for the new light it sheds on books, readers and libraries in fiction. —Katherine Halsey, Professor of English Studies, University of Stirling
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Introduction: Books, Reading, and Libraries in Fiction
Karen Attar and Andrew Nash -
1 Reading Envisioned in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries
Daniel Sawyer -
2 ‘The Gay Part of Reading’: Corruption through Reading?
Rahel Orgis -
3 ‘Fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilet’: Reading Fiction Together in the Eighteenth Century
Abigail Williams -
4 Jane Austen’s Refinement of the Intradiegetic Novel Reader in Northanger Abbey: A Study in Ricoeurian Hermeneutics of Recuperation
Monika Class -
5 ‘Evaluating Negative Representations of Reading: Ivan Turgenev’s Faust (1855)’
Shafquat Towheed -
6 ‘I spent all yesterday trying to read’: Reading in the Face of Existential Threat in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Hannah Callahan -
7 ‘Into separate brochures’: Stitched Work and a New New Testament in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure
Lucy Sixsmith -
8 A Fire Fed on Books: Books and Reading in D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers
Susan Watson -
9 ‘I sometimes like to read a novel’: Books and Reading in Victorian Adventure Romance
Andrew Nash -
10 When It Isn’t Cricket: Books, Reading and Libraries in the Girls’ School Story
Karen Attar -
11 The Body in the Library in the Fiction of Agatha Christie and her `Golden Age’ Contemporaries
Keith Manley -
12 ‘Very Nearly Magical’: Books and their Readers in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Series
Jane Suzanne Carroll