Synopses & Reviews
In the 19th century, the reading public expanded to embrace new categories of consumers, especially of cheap fiction. These new lower class and female readers frightened liberals, Catholics and republicans alike. Martyn Lyons focuses on workers, women, and peasants, and the ways in which their reading was constructed as a social and political problem, to analyze the fear of reading in 19th Century France. He presents case-studies of actual readers, to examine their choices and their practices, and to evaluate how far they responded to (or subverted) attempts at cultural domination.
Review
"...a valuable contribution to its field..."--James Smith Allen, Libraries & Culture
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
...both as a useful synthesis of the history of nineteenth century reading and an original contribution to it.
-American Historical Review
About the Author
Martyn Lyons is Professor of History, University of New South Wales.
Table of Contents
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