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The History of Education as the History of Reading*

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 36; Issue: 4-5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00467600701496922

1464-5130

Jonathan Rose,

Media, Communication, and Education

Abstract Footnote* This paper surveys recent studies in the history of reading that historians of education will find useful, given that all education involves some form of reading. It describes the sources that historians of reading use, the models they employ (such as the ‘Reading Revolution’ of the eighteenth century), and the questions they address (such as the influence of gender on reading). Dissenting from the Frankfurt School, Marxism, poststructuralism, semiotics and much feminist criticism, historians of reading have discovered and emphasized the autonomy of the ‘common reader’ and the liberating power of reading. *An earlier version of this paper was published in Historically Speaking (January 2004), under the title ‘Arriving at a History of Reading’. It is published here with some revisions and with the kind permission of the editors. Notes *An earlier version of this paper was published in Historically Speaking (January 2004), under the title ‘Arriving at a History of Reading’. It is published here with some revisions and with the kind permission of the editors. 1 Rose, Jonathan. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2001: 168–172. 2 For example, see also Nalle, Sara T. “Literacy and Culture in Early Modern Castile.” Past & Present 125 (November 1989): 65–96. 3 Burnett, John, David Vincent, and David Mayall, eds. The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated, Critical Bibliography, 3 vols. New York: New York University Press, 1984–89. 4 See, for example, Moss, Ann. Printed Commplace‐books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996, and Miller, Susan. Assuming the Positions: Cultural Pedagogy and the Politics of Commonplace Writing. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998. 5 Thomas, Amy M. “Reading the Silences: Documenting the History of American Tract Society Readers in the Antebellum South.” In Reading Acts: U.S. Readers’ Interactions with Literature, 1800–1950, edited by Barbara Ryan and Amy M. Thomas. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002: 107–36. 6 Nord, David Paul. Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004: ch. 7. 7 Amtower, Laurel. Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in the Later Middle Ages. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000: ch. 2. 8 Gilmore, William J. Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780–1835. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989: 277–82. 9 Kennedy, Máire. “Women and Reading in Eighteenth‐Century Ireland.” In The Experience of Reading: Irish Historical Perspectives, edited by Bernadette Cunningham and Máire Kennedy. Dublin: Rare Books Group of the Library Association of Ireland and Economic and Social History Society of Ireland, 1999: 88–94. 10 Rose, Jonathan. “How Historians Study Reader Response: or, What Did Jo Think of Bleak House?” In Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth‐Century British Publishing & Reading Practices, edited by John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995: 196. The survey, carried out by Charles Welsh, was reported in Salmon, Edward. Juvenile Literature as It Is. London: Henry J. Drane, 1888: ch. 1. 11 Kelley, Mary. “Reading Women/Women Reading: The Making of Learned Women in Antebellum America”, in Reading Acts, 56. 12 Pawley, Christine. Reading on the Middle Border: The Culture of Print in Late‐Nineteenth‐Century Osage, Iowa. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001: 108–11. 13 Karr, Clarence. Authors and Audiences: Popular Canadian Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century. Montreal and Kingston: McGill: Queen’s University Press, 2000: ch. 10. 14 Lyons, Martyn. Readers and Society in Nineteenth‐Century France: Workers, Women, Peasants. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001: chs 4–5. 15 Karr, Authors and Audiences, 165. 16 Nord, David Paul. Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and Their Readers. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001: ch. 11. 17 Lyons. Readers and Society in Nineteenth‐Century France, 55. 18 Jackson, H. J. Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2001: 165–78. 19 Pearson, Jacqueline. Women’s Reading in Britain 1750–1835: A Dangerous Recreation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999: 16–21. 20 Jagodzinski, Cecile M. Privacy and Print: Reading and Writing in Seventeenth‐Century England. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1999: 1–2. 21 Newell, Stephanie. Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana: ‘How to Play the Game of Life’. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002: 2–3. 22 Amtower, Engaging Words, 1–2. 23 Noted in Sharpe, Kevin. Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000: 41–42. 24 Quoted in Dobranski, Stephen B. Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005: 29–31. 25 Ibid., ch. 1. 26 Bennett, H. S. English Books & Readers 1603–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970: 208. 27 Nord, Communities of Journalism, 266–70. 28 Darnton, Robert. “First Steps Toward a History of Reading.” In The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990: 181. 29 Amtower, Engaging Words, 7–9.