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 work- ings 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 © editorial matter and organisation Jonathan Rose, 2020 © the chapters their several authors, 2020 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ 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) The right of Jonathan Rose to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). 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 Propa ganda’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 middle brow 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.