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Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England

Autor Jan Fergus
en Limba Engleză Hardback – 24 ian 2007
Many scholars have written about eighteenth-century English novels, but no one really knows who read them. This study provides historical data on the provincial reading publics for various forms of fiction - novels, plays, chapbooks, children's books, and magazines. Archival records of Midland booksellers based in five market towns and selling printed matter to over thirty-three hundred customers between 1744 and 1807 form the basis for new information about who actually bought and borrowed different kinds of fiction in eighteenth-century provincial England. This book thus offers the first solid demographic information about actual readership in eighteenth-century provincial England, not only about the class, profession, age, and sex of readers but also about the market of available fiction from which they made their choices - and some speculation about why they made the choices they did. Contrary to received ideas, men in the provinces were the principal customers for eighteenth-century novels, including those written by women. Provincial customers preferred to buy rather than borrow fiction, and women preferred plays and novels written by women - women's works would have done better had women been the principal consumers. That is, demand for fiction (written by both men and women) was about equal for the first five years, but afterward the demand for women's works declined. Both men and women preferred novels with identifiable authors to anonymous ones, however, and both boys and men were able to cross gender lines in their reading. Goody Two-Shoes was one of the more popular children's books among Rugby schoolboys, and men read the Lady's Magazine. These and other findings will alter the way scholars look at the fiction of the period, the questions asked, and the histories told of it.
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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780199297825
ISBN-10: 0199297827
Pagini: 336
Ilustrații: 1 map, 1 line drawing, numerus tables
Dimensiuni: 160 x 240 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.52 kg
Editura: OUP OXFORD
Colecția OUP Oxford
Locul publicării:Oxford, United Kingdom

Recenzii

fascinating study of provincial bookbuyers and book borrowers in the Midlands in the second half of the eighteenth century.
a valuable piece of scholarship, and must become an essential point of departure for any discussion of the history of reading practices and provincial culture in the eighteenth century.
makes a helpful contribution to the history of reading...we can be grateful to Jan Fergus for giving us this thought-provoking foray into the Midland archives.
Rare is a book that uses a slender and apparently particularized archive to transform broader historical understanding. Such a volume is Jan Fergus's investigation of the audience for fiction in eighteenth-century England... skilfully written. Rarely has understatement been so effective, and admonitions are delivered with devastating politeness.
...impressive...I enjoyed this book greatly
The immense scholarly labour Fergus puts in...[helps] to make some very challenging and important claims about the book trade and reading practices...incredibly revealing of the patterns of reading...a very important book
Fergus offers a vivid depiction of reading as a scene of cultural desire and prohibition
represents an undeniably valuable contribution to the new interdisciplinary field of book history ... far from being a dry study of numbers, sets out a provocative snap-shot of the material reality for a reading public forming in early modern England.

Notă biografică

Jan Fergus, Professor of English at Lehigh University and a popular speaker at meetings of the Jane Austen Society of North America, has published two books on Jane Austen as well as a number of articles on Austen and on eighteenth-century audiences. She received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to complete this book on the reading public.