Eighteenth-Century Manners of Reading
Print Culture and Popular Instruction in the Anglophone Atlantic World

This book explores how and why reading was taught in the eighteenth century, exploring different teaching methods in social and economic context.

Eve Tavor Bannet (Author)

9781108419109, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 November 2017

306 pages, 4 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.1 cm, 0.59 kg

'In five illuminating and subtle chapters, Eve Tavor Bannet recovers six differently defined (but fascinatingly interdependent) 'manners' of reading, greatly refining our understanding of prevailing reading perceptions, prescriptions, and presumptions. She convincingly presents these manners of reading as multiple strategies effectively to connect and reassociate the separateness (or, as she puts it, discontinuities and disconnections) of myriad texts, words, and letters.' James Raven, Eighteenth-Century Fiction

The market for print steadily expanded throughout the eighteenth-century Atlantic world thanks to printers' efforts  to ensure that ordinary people knew how to read and use printed matter. Reading is and was a collection of practices, performed in diverse but always very specific ways. These practices were spread down the social hierarchy through printed guides. Eve Tavor Bannet explores guides to six manners or methods of reading, each with its own social, economic, commercial, intellectual and pedagogical functions, and each promoting a variety of fragmentary and discontinuous reading practices. The increasingly widespread production of periodicals, pamphlets, prefaces, conduct books, conversation-pieces and fictions, together with schoolbooks designed for adults and children, disseminated all that people of all ages and ranks might need or wish to know about reading, and prepared them for new jobs and roles both in Britain and America.

Introduction: the schoolroom in the marketplace
1. The ABCs of reading
2. Arts of reading
3. Polite reading
4. Ordinary discontinuous reading
5. Reading secret writing.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Literary studies: general [DSB], Literature: history & criticism [DS]