Subversive Readers Enriches Our Understanding of the Multiple V B E U

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EHR layout vol4.qxp_Layout 1 26/03/2020 13:39 Page 1 S T u The Edinburgh History of Reading h b e v General Editors: Mary Hammond and Jonathan Rose E HE DINBURGH ISTORY OF EADING e T E H R d r s i n i

‘Subversive Readers enriches our understanding of the multiple v b e u

tensions that inform culturally specific acts of reading. This R r g e Subversive Readers

globally diverse collection of essays, written by young scholars h a

d as well as seasoned book historians, persuasively demonstrates H e EDITED BY JONATHAN ROSE i r s how reading can be both a collective social practice and an s t o

intimately personal experience.’ r y

Barbara Hochman, Ben-Gurion University o f

R e

Reveals the experience of reading in many cultures a d i

and across the ages n g Bringing together the latest scholarship from all over the world on topics ranging from reading practices in ancient China to the workings of the twenty-first-century reading brain, the four volumes of the Edinburgh History of Reading demonstrate that reading is a deeply imbricated, socio-political practice, at once personal and public, defiant and obedient. It is often materially ephemeral, but it can also be emotionally and intellectually enduring.

Subversive Readers explores the strategies used by readers to question E d i

authority, challenge convention, resist oppression, assert their t e

independence and imagine a better world. This kind of insurgent reading d

may be found everywhere: in revolutionary France and Nazi Germany, in b y

Eastern Europe under Communism and in Australian and Iranian prisons, J o

among eighteenth-century women reading history and nineteenth-century n men reading erotica, and among postcolonial Africans, the blind, and a t pioneering transgender activists. h a n

is William R. Kenan Professor of History at Drew University. R

Jonathan Rose o s e

Cover image: The Reader , Stephen Daldry, 2008 © The Weinstein Company Photographer: Melinda Sue Gordon. Weinstein Co/Photofest Cover design: www.hayesdesign.co.uk ISBN 978-1-4744-6191-7

edinburghuniversitypress.com The Edinburgh History of Reading: Subversive Readers THE EDINBURGH HISTORY OF READING

General Editors: Mary Hammond and Jonathan Rose

Bringing together the latest scholarship from all over the world on topics ranging from reading practices in ancient China to the workings of the twenty-first-century reading brain, the four volumes of The Edinburgh History of Reading demonstrate that reading is a deeply imbricated, socio-political practice, at once personal and public, defiant and obedient. It is often materially ephemeral, but it can also be emotionally and intellectually enduring.

Early Readers, edited by Mary Hammond Modern Readers, edited by Mary Hammond Common Readers, edited by Jonathan Rose Subversive Readers, edited by Jonathan Rose The Edinburgh History of Reading: Subversive Readers

Edited by Jonathan Rose Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com

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Typeset in Sabon and Futura by R. J. Footring Ltd, Derby, UK, and printed and bound in Great Britain.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 4744 6191 7 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 6192 4 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 6193 1 (epub)

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Published with the support of the University of Edinburgh Scholarly Publishing Initiatives Fund. Contents

List of Figures and Plates vii List of Contributors ix

Introduction 1 Jonathan Rose 1 History, Politics and the Separate Spheres: Women’s Reading in Eighteenth-Century Britain and America 10 Mark Towsey 2 Reading in Australian Prisons: An Exploration of Motivation 31 Mary Carroll and Jane Garner 3 Hawking Terror: Reading the French Revolutionary Press 52 Valerae Hurley 4 Hellfire and Cannibals: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Erotic Reading Groups and Their Manuscripts 75 Brian M. Watson 5 The ‘tactile Ba[b]ble under which the blind have hitherto groaned’: Dots, Lines and Literacy for the Blind in Nineteenth-Century North America 97 Joanna L. Pearce 6 British Cultures of Reading and Literary Appreciation in Nineteenth-Century Singapore 116 Porscha Fermanis 7 Moral Readership and Political Apprenticeship: Commentaries on English Education in India, 1875–1930 138 Pramod K. Nayar 8 The ‘Pleasure and Profit’ of Reading: Adolescents and Juvenile Popular Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century 162 Trudi Abel 9 Trans Culture and the Circulation of Ideas 184 Lisa Z. Sigel vi Contents

10 Reading History, History Reading in Modern Iranian Literature: Prison Writing as National Allegory or a World Literary Genre? 207 Alireza Fakhrkonandeh 11 Beyond Mein Kampf: Bestsellers, Writers, Readers and the Politics of Literature in Nazi Germany 234 Christian Adam 12 Reading Spaces in Japanese-Occupied Indonesia: The Project to Create and Translate a Japanese-Language Library 255 Atsuhiko Wada, translated by Edward Mack 13 Just Send Zhivago: Reading Over, Under and Through the Iron Curtain 270 Jessica Brandt 14 African Readers as World Readers: UNESCO, Worldreader and the Perception of Reading 289 Ruth Bush 15 The Kindle Era: DIY Publishing and African-American Readers 313 Kinohi Nishikawa 16 ‘I loved the stories – they weren’t boring’: Narrative Gaps, the ‘Disnarrated’ and the Significance of Style in Prison Reading Groups 333 Patricia Canning

Select Bibliography 351 Index of Methods and Sources 370 General Index 371 Figures and Plates

Figures

11.1 List of Publications Unsuitable for Young People and Libraries, compiled by the Propaganda Ministry, 1940 237 11.2 German book production (numbers of titles), compared with other countries, 1934 241 11.3 Frontline bookstore on a bus in occupied France 244 11.4 ‘The People Live Through the Book’, from the Ministry of Propaganda’s Die Woche des Deutschen Buches 1936 (German Book Week 1936) 245 12.1 Advertisement for the Nihon Shuppan Haikyū Gaisha (Nippai), Shin Jawa, 1 (October 1944) 263 15.1 Schema from Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing 317 15.2 Schema from Mark McGurl, ‘Everything and Less: Fiction in the Age of Amazon’ 324

Plates

1 Cover of Laura Lee Hope’s The Outdoor Girls of Deepdale (1913) 2 Sun Koh: The Hypnotised Submarine (number 9 in the series Sun Koh: Der Erbe von Atlantis). On the cover of the first edition, Sun Koh is accompanied by Nimba 3 A later edition of Sun Koh: The Hypnotised Submarine, with Nimba omitted 4 Front cover of Thicker Than Water (2008)

Contributors

Trudi Abel is a cultural historian and archivist at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University. She currently directs the undergraduate Archives Alive initiative and ‘Teaching with Archives’, a Duke Summer Doctoral Academy seminar.

Christian Adam studied German literature and journalism at the Free University of Berlin, and then worked for several publishers as an editor. Since 2007 he has served the Federal Commissioner for the Records of the GDR Ministry for State Security (Stasi) in Berlin as Head of First Releases, and since 2015 he has been Head of Pub- lications at the Centre for Military History and Social Sciences of the Bundeswehr in Potsdam. His books include Lesen unter Hitler: Autoren, Bestseller, Leser im Dritten Reich (2010) and Der Traum vom Jahre Null. Autoren, Bestseller, Leser: Die Neuordnung der Bücher- welt in Ost und West nach 1945 (2016).

Jessica Brandt is Associate Dean in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Montclair State University. Her research focuses on transnational media during the Cold War, with a recent chapter on the intersection of Star Wars, public radio and middlebrow culture in A Galaxy Here and Now: Historical and Cultural Readings of Star Wars (edited by Peter W. Lee, 2016). She is currently working on an interactive digital project incorporating Radio Liberty broadcasts with listener mail.

Ruth Bush is Senior Lecturer in French and Comparative Literature at the University of Bristol. Her first book was Publishing Africa in French: Literary Institutions and Decolonization 1945–67 (2016), which won the First Book Prize of the African Literature Association. She has also published a history of New Beacon Books, the UK’s first radical black bookshop and publishing house; and co-produced an exhibition and digital resource about Awa: la revue de la femme noire, a pioneering early African women’s magazine.

ix x Contributors

Patricia Canning is Assistant Professor of Stylistics, Rhetoric and Lin- guistics at University College Utrecht. Her research investigates the linguistic production and reception of narratives in forensic contexts. Her published work includes Style in the Renaissance: Language and Ideology in Early Modern England (2012), as well as many articles and chapters on style and literature, and readers’ responses to both. She has established a number of reading groups in forensic environments and is currently writing a book on reading experiences in prison.

Mary Carroll is an associate professor and course director in the School of Information Studies, Charles Sturt University. Her research focuses on the relationship between education and libraries and on the history of collections used in education.

Alireza Fakhrkonandeh is Assistant Professor in Modern and Con- temporary Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Southampton. His publications include Body and Event in Howard Barker’s The Castle and Other Plays (2019) as well as numerous journal articles on Howard Barker, somaesthetics, oil and literature, and medical humanities, appearing in journals such as Symploke, Textual Practice, Comparative Drama and Cultural Critique. He is the sole authorised translator of Barker’s works into Persian. His book Oil and World Dramas is forthcoming in 2020.

Porscha Fermanis is Professor of Romantic Literature at University College Dublin. Her books include John Keats and the Ideas of the En- lightenment (2009); Rethinking British Romantic History, 1780–1850 (edited with John Regan, 2014); Romanticism: A Literary and Cul- tural History (with Carmen Casaliggi, 2016); Early Public Libraries and Colonial Citizenship in the British Southern Hemisphere (with Lara Atkin et al., 2019); and Romantic Pasts: History, Fiction, and Feeling, 1790–1850 (forthcoming). She is currently principal investiga- tor of a project on nineteenth-century literary culture in the southern hemisphere, funded by the European Research Council.

Jane Garner is a lecturer with the School of Information Studies, Charles Sturt University. Her research focusses on the role and value of libraries in prisons as well as in the lives of both child and adult prisoners.

Valerae Hurley is Senior Professor of History at Union County College. She was the 2014 recipient of the League of Innovations Contributors xi

Excellence Award. She is currently working on a comparison study of politically polarised women in the French Revolution.

Pramod K. Nayar teaches in the Department of English at the Univer- sity of Hyderabad, India. His most recent books include Ecoprecarity (2019) Brand Postcolonial (2018), Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic (2017), Human Rights and Literature (2016) and The Indian Graphic Novel (2016). Forthcoming work includes Indian Travel Writing in the Age of Empire, 1830-1940 (Bloomsbury).

Kinohi Nishikawa is Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton University. He has published on African-American print and popular culture in the journals Book History, American Literary History and PMLA, and in the edited collections Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights (edited by Derek C. Maus and James J. Donahue, 2014) and The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art (edited by Frances Gateward and John Jennings, 2015). His first book, Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Under ground, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018.

Joanna L. Pearce is a PhD candidate in history at York University in Toronto. Her dissertation, ‘“Which naught but the light of knowl- edge can dispel”: Experiencing Blindness in Nineteenth-Century North America’, examines the experiences of blind people who did not attend residential schools. Her research on the establishment of free education for blind children in Nova Scotia was published in the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association in 2012.

Jonathan Rose is William R. Kenan Professor of History at Drew Uni- versity. He was the founding president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, and a founding editor of the journal Book History. He currently edits (with Shafquat Towheed) the monograph series New Directions in Book History (Palgrave Macmil- lan). His books include The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001); The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preser- vation (2001); The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor (2014); Readers’ Liberation (2018); and (with Simon Eliot) A New Compan- ion to the History of the Book (2nd edition, 2019).

Lisa Z. Sigel is Professor of History at DePaul University. Her books include Governing Pleasures (2002), International Exposure (2005), xii Contributors

Making Modern Love (2012) and The People’s Porn: A History of Handmade Pornography in America (2020). She curated the major exhibition ‘Hardcore: A Century and a Half of Obscene Imagery’ at the Museum of Sex in New York City (2015–17).

Mark Towsey is Professor of the History of the Book and Director of the Eighteenth-Century Worlds Research Centre at the University of Liverpool. His publications include Reading the Scottish Enlighten ment: Books and Their Readers in Provincial Scotland, 1750–1820 (2010), Before the Public Library: Reading, Community and Iden- tity in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850 (2017) and Reading History in Britain and America, c. 1750 – c. 1840 (2019).

Atsuhiko Wada is Professor of Modern Japanese Literature at Waseda University. His research focuses on the history of reading and publishing in Japan from the nineteenth century onward. His books (in Japanese) include The Japan–US Relationship Viewed Through Book Circulation: Establishing the Beginning of Literacy History (2007); Books Across Borders: The Past and Present of Readers’ Circum- stances (2011); and An Inquiry into the History of Reading: Readers and Print Culture in Modern Japan (2014).

Brian M. Watson is the Graduate Archivist at the Kinsey Institute Library and Special Collections, as well as a historian of the book and sexuality. In information science, Watson researches linked data and queer classification in archives; in history, interests include long histories of sexuality, censorship and obscenity. Watson holds an MA in History and Culture from Drew University and is finishing an MLIS at Indiana University Bloomington. Publications include Annals of Pornographie: How Porn Became Bad (2017) and a chapter in Repre- senting Kink (2019). Watson tweets at @brimwats. Introduction

Jonathan Rose

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a literary critic, but in 1992 I presumptuously wrote that academic critics seemed to be headed in the wrong direction. By and large, I thought, they underestimated the independence of the reader. The general thrust of Marxist, feminist and post-colonial criticism presumed that texts effectively propagandised and manipulated readers, that the act of reading itself involved ‘passive insertions into pre-existing discursive positions’ (to quote Kaja Silverman). If that was the case, then there was no point in studying readers at all; one need only examine the text to determine what it ‘obliges’ the reader to think.1 However, there were already some scholars who sensed, as I did, that readers exercised a large measure of control over their own reading. Carlo Ginzburg located a sixteenth-century Italian miller who brought his own distinctive interpretations to the books he studied, interpretations that did not please the Inquisition.2 Janice Radway found that romance novels were not in fact insinuating patri archal values in the minds of their fans, as many feminists feared.3 Studying seventeenth-century English labourers and peasants, Margaret Spufford was ‘startled’ to find that they were reading the Bible with minds of their own, ‘far from being the docile material which their ministers no doubt desired’.4 We all found, in widely diverse reading publics, what Roger Chartier termed ‘appropriation’: that is, texts are ‘less than totally efficacious and radically acculturat- ing’, because readers make of those texts what they will.5 And since then, historians have located readers everywhere who read books in ways that deeply disturbed clerics, educators, critics and propagan- dists – readings that even the authors of those texts never intended.6 That kind of reading is possible even (or perhaps especially) in totali tarian societies. This volume, then, focuses on the subversive reader,

1 2 Jonathan Rose though some might prefer the adjectives independent, resistant, sceptical or just plain ornery. A major episode in the emancipation of women was the Enlight- enment, which saw a surge in female authorship and female literacy. And as Mark Towsey argues in Chapter 1, ‘History, Politics and the Separate Spheres: Women’s Reading in Eighteenth-Century Britain and America’, women were also reading more widely. They were devouring history, heretofore regarded as a man’s business, and histori ans like David Hume and William Robertson responded to the new market by making their works more female-friendly. Naturally, women readers wanted to read about women’s history, especially Mary Stuart, Elizabeth Tudor and Marie Antoinette. But they also learned a great deal about politics, given that historiography was then (and to a large extent still is) inherently political. Long before women were formally enfranchised, some elite women played active and important political roles: as hostesses and networkers, as assistants to their husbands’ parliamentary careers, or sometimes as local power brokers in their own right. In those capacities, they found that an understanding of history enabled them to break out of their ‘separate sphere’. Down the social scale, some audiences were more captive. In Chapter 2, ‘Reading in Australian Prisons: An Exploration of Motiva tion’, Mary Carroll and Jane Garner show that convict reading has always been a central part of the Australian national experience, ever since the arrival of the first prison ships in 1788. Of course, the first books provided for prisoners were pious and uplifting, but in the early 1840s Alexander Maconochie, chief of the penal colony on Norfolk Island, experimented with more liberal library policies. He did not object to polemical works (‘They open the mind’) and he logically concluded that Robinson Crusoe, James Cook’s Voyages and perhaps even Scott’s Waverley novels might prepare inmates for productive post-prison lives in the antipodes. He was accused of coddling convicts and was dismissed, but his methods were adopted by prison reformers elsewhere. So it is ironic (as Carroll and Garner note) that Australian prison libraries today are usually inadequate, underfunded and neglected. But in response, prisoners have taken matters into their own hands, and many of them have become passionate readers. They often seek the kind of broad liberal education they did not get in school, pursuing everything from geology to Roman history. Of course they seek escape, as well as inspirational stories about those who have triumphed over adversity. As yet we have found no surviving evidence of reader response among Australia’s earliest convicts, but perhaps they too found a similar kind of liberation in books. Introduction 3

This is not to say that subversive reading is necessarily a good thing. Under certain conditions, it can lead straight to mass hysteria. In 1789, centuries of royal press censorship in France came to a sudden end, and for a few years anyone could publish anything. Competing newspapers proliferated across the political spectrum. In Chapter 3, ‘Hawking Terror: Reading the French Revolutionary Press’, Valerae Hurley closely tracks post-revolutionary papers on both the left and the right, and notes the rapidly increasing use of the term vengeance: royalists called on readers to avenge the humiliation of the royal family, while republicans demanded popular retribution for centuries of aristocratic exploitation and repression. For a few sous, anyone could patronise cabinets de lecture, where they could read all the Parisian papers and follow the vitriol. Editors on both sides learned that extremist journalism built circulation. They read each other’s increasingly bloodthirsty diatribes, and as their rhetoric escalated out of control, they urged their readers to pre-emptively strike down their enemies. The result was the Reign of Terror, which was largely fomented by journalists, and ultimately sent many of them to the guillotine. As Robert Darnton established, the history of books definitely includes dirty books, which can tell us a great deal about sexuality, politics and even Enlightenment philosophy. Eminently respectable historians like Darnton, Ian Frederick Moulton, Lynn Hunt, Julie Peakman, Sarah Toulalan and Lisa Z. Sigel have done much to legiti mise the serious study of pornography, though the field still carries something of a stigma (as scholars discover when they return from overseas research trips and try to bring their notes and photocopies through customs). Historians of pornographic books have focused on their texts and illustrations, the authors (often anonymous) who wrote them, the publishers (often clandestine) who printed them, the booksellers who sold them (often under the counter) and the officials who outlawed them. But very little has been written about their readers, and that is the subject of Brian M. Watson’s chapter, ‘Hellfire and Cannibals: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Erotic Reading Groups and Their Manuscripts’. Watson asks the same questions that historians ask about all readers: how did they interpret, respond to, engage with and use texts, which in this case happened to be salacious? These questions are difficult to answer, precisely because pornography is almost by definition subversive: it is sexual literature that we suppress because we view it as a threat to the moral order. Although some readers have left records of erotic reading (for instance, the diaries of William Gladstone), such accounts tend to be self-incriminating and are therefore rare. Watson has, however, located two understudied groups 4 Jonathan Rose distinguished by their cultivation and appreciation of pornographic literature. The eighteenth-century Hellfire Club sponsored The Dis course on the Worship of Priapus (1786–7): its members included the populist rake John Wilkes, author of the scandalous An Essay on Woman (1752). The nineteenth-century Cannibal Club was led by Sir Richard Francis Burton and the pioneering erotic bibliographer Henry Spencer Ashbee. It produced such works as the first translation of the Kama Sutra (1885) and The Perfumed Garden: A Manual of Arabian Erotology (1886). Although both circles are sometimes mentioned in biographies, they have not yet been studied as sites of pornographic reading. But both yield revealing primary source evidence in the form of letters, diaries and the scandalous texts themselves. For the past century Braille has been the standard print system for the blind, but its general adoption was not inevitable or uncontested. The familiar six-dot grid was invented by a French blind man in the 1820s, yet competing alphabets were proposed by both blind and sighted advocates. The result was a long-running and many-sided public controversy, traced by Joanna L. Pearce in Chapter 5, ‘The “tactile Ba[b]ble under which the blind have hitherto groaned”: Dots, Lines and Literacy for the Blind in Nineteenth-Century North America’. Some favoured embossed Roman letters; others tried to devise systems that would allow the blind to easily write as well as read. This debate was carried on not just by sighted publishers and educational officials: many blind self-advocates (including Helen Keller) vocally participated. This chapter aims to restore these now-forgotten blind activists to the narrative of disability history. Colonial regimes don’t normally encourage subversive reading among either colonists or the colonised. As Porscha Fermanis notes in Chapter 6, ‘British Cultures of Reading and Literary Apprecia- tion in Nineteenth-Century Singapore’, early British libraries in the colony reflected conventional middle-class tastes, including Edward Bulwer Lytton, Frances Trollope and the surplus stock of Mudie’s Select Library. At first their clientele was almost entirely male and European. They scarcely noticed that, meanwhile, the Malay and Chinese communities were developing their own extensive networks of circulating libraries. The colonists tried to standardise Malay and publish translations in that fairly artificial language, but Malays found these books unidiomatic, ungrammatical and practically unreadable. Moving forward into the early twentieth century, the British libraries opened up somewhat: they admitted a significant minority of Asian members, they became increasingly interested in Malay literature and ethnography, and they occasionally stocked Arabic and Malay books. Introduction 5

In his notorious 1835 minute, Thomas Babington Macaulay had declared that an education in English literature would inculcate Indian students with English moral values, and British educators in India proceeded on that assumption. But towards the end of the century, it was apparent to worried imperial officials that this peda- gogical strategy had backfired. English texts were supposed to make Indians productive colonial subjects, freed from local loyalties to caste or religion and open to capitalist modernity. But the young Anglo- phone generation of Indians was in fact discontented and sceptical of authority: evidently they had read English authors subversively, as Pramod K. Nayar explains in Chapter 7, ‘Moral Readership and Political Apprenticeship: Commentaries on English Education in India, 1875–1930’. Gooroo Dass Banerjee, the future vice chancellor of Calcutta University, granted that there was much to be said for English culture, but, after all, Indians had been teaching their own morality for a few millennia, and didn’t necessarily need imports. In Theodore Roosevelt’s America, adolescent readers carved out what was arguably the first youth culture, as uncovered by Trudi Abel in Chapter 8, ‘The “Pleasure and Profit” of Reading: Adolescents and Juvenile Popular Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century’. The Edward Stratemeyer syndicate churned out a vast array of book series for young people, of which the best known are Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. Today they strike us as hopelessly quaint and wholesome, but in the early twentieth century public librarians banished them from their shelves. Undeterred, young readers built up their own collections and loaned out volumes to each other. These books invariably appealed to adolescent desires for independence: for instance, the Outdoor Girls series, in which a circle of girlfriends enjoyed travel and camping adventures. Fans of that series wrote gushing letters to the author, Laura Lee Hope – though she was as fictitious as the characters in the series. In reality Laura Lee Hope was one of eighty-nine pseudonyms used by Stratemeyer, who sketched in plots, farmed them out to ghost writers and then polished the final versions. Yet to her young readers, Laura Lee Hope represented an inspirational model of a modern career woman, even if Stratemeyer himself had fairly conservative ideas about gender roles. A very different (and distinctly subversive) morality was circulated via pornography throughout what would now be called the transgender community, well before the term was coined. In Chapter 9, ‘Trans Culture and the Circulation of Ideas’, Lisa Z. Sigel identifies a body of erotic literature, originating in the late nineteenth century, which centred on themes of forced feminisation. Given that these 6 Jonathan Rose stories generally involved sexual bondage, pain and humiliation, some readers may find them deeply disturbing. But all ideological, religious, national, cultural and sexual movements organise around a core of common texts, and Sigel argues that these pornographic tales served that function for transgenderism. Transgender individuals may have always existed, but this literature enabled them to come together as a conscious and self-defined community. Sigel tracks in detail how these materials were sold, saved, scrapbooked and recirculated through the used-books trade in Europe and America. By the 1950s they had found their way into the archives of the Kinsey Institute in Indiana. They were suppressed by state censorship and often hidden by transsexuals themselves, who feared (not without reason) that revealing this side of their sexuality would repel doctors and scientific researchers. But such literature continues to flourish today on websites. We anticipate that this chapter will be controversial in the finest sense of the term, and that it will become a salient contribution to the emerging field of transgender history. Given the political history of modern Iran, prison writing in evitably dominates Iranian literary history. In Chapter 10, ‘Reading History, History Reading in Modern Iranian Literature: Prison Writing as National Allegory or a World Literary Genre?’, Alireza Fakhrkonandeh addresses the question of the intended audience for these memoirs: are these imagined readers Iranian or international, and how does the choice of audience affect the construction of the narrative? Does the prison experience itself fundamentally change the way the prisoner (or ex-prisoner) reads? And can that experience ever be communicated to readers who have never been caged or tortured? Historians of censorship have found again and again that no matter how severely literature is repressed, it continues to be read underground. Christian Adam reaches that conclusion in Chapter 11, ‘Beyond Mein Kampf: Bestsellers, Writers, Readers and the Politics of Literature in Nazi Germany’. Book-burnings and propaganda dominate the popular image of literary life under the Third Reich, and they were certainly a frightening reality, but underneath these ideological terrors, quiet and diverse reading continued. Stormtroopers could not weed out every forbidden volume in used-book stalls and private libraries. In practice, Fahrenheit 451 was unattainable. Even Joseph Goebbels realised that the German public would not swallow an unmixed diet of politically orthodox literature. They also needed light reading, if only to momentarily escape war and totalitarianism. Heinrich Spoerl achieved enormous success by producing featherweight novels set in Germany before the rise of Hitler, thus avoiding politically risky topics Introduction 7 altogether. Nazi censorship was ruthless but also wildly inconsist- ent, blocking some innocuous books (Erich Kästner’s Emil und die Detektive) while allowing through some not-so-subtle critiques of the regime (Ernst Jünger’s Auf den Marmorklippen). The Albatross Press (a German precursor of Penguin Books) continued to publish cheap paperback editions of the great modernists in English: the Ministry of Propaganda was not happy, but it was overruled by the Ministry of Finance, on the grounds that Albatross was earning sorely needed foreign currency. There was in fact great public demand for American and British books of all types, especially detective fiction. The censors couldn’t block them all, and they permitted novels that revealed the grimmer aspects of American society (The Grapes of Wrath) or were compat ible with Nazi racial ideology (Gone with the Wind). In the wake of Pearl Harbor, Japan swiftly conquered and occupied the Dutch East Indies, offering an unusual case study of one Asian nation trying to impose its literary culture on another. In Chapter 12, ‘Reading Spaces in Japanese-Occupied Indonesia: The Project to Create and Translate a Japanese-Language Library’, Atsuhiko Wada outlines the propaganda strategy carried out by the Japanese military, which involved the transmission of texts across national and cultural boundaries. ‘Cultural activities’ (bunka kōsaku) were a key priority of the occupation authorities, who brought Japanese writers to Indonesia and published a range of periodicals. Their goal was to replace the Eurocentric literary culture promoted by the Dutch with a literature rooted in Asia – or, more exactly, Japan. But outside of the small Japanese community in the archipelago, their efforts probably had little impact. Even though the Japanese language became a required subject in the schools, Indonesia already had a thriving indigenous reading culture in several vernacular languages, including hundreds of newspapers, at least 2,300 libraries, and millions of volumes printed and distributed every year. The title of Jessica Brandt’s chapter, ‘Just Send Zhivago: Reading Over, Under and Through the Iron Curtain’, echoes a letter from a Soviet listener to Radio Liberty in July 1968. During the Cold War, readers behind the Iron Curtain sent hundreds of letters to CIA-supported Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), requesting broadcasts of specific literary works or soliciting actual printed books, sometimes in response to a giveaway offer and sometimes apparently unsolicited. The stations often transmitted the work of dissident authors back into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, as well as translations of Western literature. In effect, RFE/RL became a disseminator of samizdat, the Russian term for self-published literature. In this case, 8 Jonathan Rose a US government agency was the literary gatekeeper, but it was highly responsive to reader demands, and it had to deal with censorship in the form of Soviet jamming. Whenever we address post-colonial literature – or indeed post-colonial anything – we must inevitably confront the question, ‘What do you mean, “post”?’ African nations may be nominally in dependent, but they are still very much under the influence of Western governments, Western corporations, Western foundations and Western NGOs. And as Pascale Casanova noted, African authors must cater to publishers, critics and literary prize juries based in New York, London or Paris.7 A prime example is the Heinemann African Writers Series: launched in 1962, the moment of formal decolonisation, it soon dominated the African textbook market. In Chapter 14, ‘African Readers as World Readers: UNESCO, Worldreader and the Perception of Reading’, Ruth Bush explains that even global literacy is promoted on Western terms, as a tool to advance economic development along Western lines. In contrast, Africans actually read promiscuously, unpredictably and often for pure pleasure. True, Western cultural influence is inescapable and African publishers commonly copy Western genres: the Adoras romance series produced by Nouvelles Éditions Ivoiriennes is essentially a knockoff of Harlequin and Mills and Boon, reset in Africa. But Bush sees the emergence of a genuinely African and reader-driven literature via social media. In Chapter 15, ‘The Kindle Era: DIY Publishing and African- American Readers’, Kinohi Nishikawa introduces another burgeoning form of samizdat. At age twenty-five, Takerra Allen launched her brilliant literary career entirely through her own efforts. Taking on the roles of author, publisher, marketer and press agent all at once, she produced her first novel, Thicker Than Water (2008). It chronicled the intertwined adventures of ‘four spitfire vixens’ from Newark (not New York) who are educated, successful and in fashion: Sex and the Inner City, you could call it. Mainstream publishers were reluctant to take on that kind of raw urban fiction, butThicker Than Water and Allen’s later novels won a huge following among black women, largely because she cut out the intermediaries and connected directly with her readers. She practically grabbed them by the shoulders in one of her introductions: ‘All of my hard work, blood, sweat, and tears is for you. Yes, you! You, reading this! Yes, you!’ Later she allowed Amazon to publish and promote her work, enabling her readers to express their public appreciation on the website. In 2017, DIY publishing accounted for 28 per cent of general American fiction but fully 71 per cent of African-American fiction. The black reading public, then, has Introduction 9 largely bypassed the big publishers and called into existence its own literary niche, a strikingly successful self-help effort. Patricia Canning worked with prisoners in Northern Ireland in the years 2010–14, and she lays out her findings in the last chapter, ‘“I loved the stories – they weren’t boring”: Narrative Gaps, the “Dis- narrated” and the Significance of Style in Prison Reading Groups’. Many researchers have found that organised reading can rehabili- tate and socialise prison inmates, and Canning offers an explanatory theory. She argues that all stories contain some ‘disnarration’: that is, they inevitably leave out some details, background and context that are essential to understanding the narrative. Those gaps must be filled creatively by readers, who thus become active co-authors, and different readers will make different authorial choices. Moreover, the actions of the characters compel readers to address questions of motive and ethics. All this takes readers out of the confines of their cells and exercises their capacity for morality and empathy. Much like Mary Carroll and Jane Garner in Chapter 2, as well as the other contributors to this volume, Canning concludes that free reading can liberate prisoners, whether their prison happens to be an Australian penitentiary, colonial India, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Iran under the shahs or the mullahs, the Newark ghetto or blindness.

Notes

1. Jonathan Rose, ‘Rereading the English Common Reader: A Preface to a History of Audiences’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 53 (January– March 1992), pp. 47–70. 2. Carlo Ginsburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). 3. Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). 4. Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth Century England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982), pp. xvii, 30–4. 5. Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 3–8. 6. For a concise overview of this scholarship, see Jonathan Rose, Readers’ Liberation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 7. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. Malcolm DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).