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In this seminar, we shall be exploring reading in the eighteenth century, notoriously a period of expanding middle-class culture along with new readers and a proliferating print market. We shall be looking at readers and reading in literature – studying, for instance, Richardson’s successful sentimental fiction – as well as the contemporary poetics of reading (displaying a remarkable affinity to today‘s affect studies and cognitive reception theory). Moving into the materiality and contexts of reading, we shall also address modes and technologies of reading – practices of social reading, for instance, note taking, print technologies and the book market as well as questions of access.
Please have read Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (Riverside abridged version possible) by the beginning of term. To a large extent, the course material will be available on Moodle.
Introductory Reading:
Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (1996). |
