Reading is both a social process and a social formation, as this book illustrates across centuries and cultural contexts. Highlighting links evident in reading communities from literary salons to online environments, each essay reflects the rich repertoire of research methods available to reading scholars.

Reading is both a social process and a social formation, as this book illustrates across centuries and cultural contexts. Highlighting links evident in reading communities from literary salons to online environments, each essay reflects the rich repertoire of research methods available to reading scholars.

Winner of the 2022 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Titles Samizdat, the production and circulation of texts outside official channels, was an integral part of life in the final decades of the Soviet Union. But as Josephine von Zitzewitz explains, while much is known about the texts themselves, little is available on the complex communities and cultures that existed around them due to their necessarily secretive, and sometimes dissident, nature. By analysing the behaviours of different actors involved in Samizdat – readers, typists, librarians and the editors of periodicals in 1970s Leningrad, The Culture of Samizdat fills this lacuna in Soviet history scholarship. Crucially, as well as providing new insight into Samizdat texts, the book makes use of oral and written testimonies to examine the role of Samizdat activists and employs an interdisciplinary theoretical approach drawing on both the sociology of reading and book history. In doing so, von Zitzewitz uncovers the importance of 'middlemen' for Samizdat culture. Diligently researched and engagingly written, this book will be of great value to scholars of Soviet cultural history and Russian literary studies alike.

This book unpacks recent changes in the landscape of literature and language teaching, and aims to find new explanations for the altered relationships between readers and writers, the democratisation of authorship, and the emergence of new ways of using language. By examining topics as various as literature and technology, multimodality, and new Englishes, the authors take a fresh look at the use of literature as a tool in the teaching of English to second-language speakers. More than simply a way of teaching aesthetic and ethical values and rhetorical skills, they argue that literature can also be used to help students to critically evaluate assumptions about society, culture and power which underpin the production and reception of texts. The book relates theories of language acquisition and literary criticism to examples of literary texts from a wide range of global literature in English, and discusses new ways of engaging with it, such as transmedia story telling, book blogs and slam poetry. It will be of interest to language teachers and teacher trainers, and to students and scholars of applied linguistics, TESOL, and digital literacies.

Reveals the experience of reading in many cultures and across the agesShows the experiences of ordinary readers in Scotland, Australasia, Russia, and ChinaExplores how digital media has transformed literary criticismPortrays everyday reading in art Includes reading across national and cultural linesCommon Readers casts a fascinating light on the literary experiences of ordinary people: miners in Scotland, churchgoers in Victorian London, workers in Czarist Russia, schoolgirls in rural Australia, farmers in Republican China, and forward to today's online book discussion groups. Chapters in this volume explore what they read, and how books changed their lives.

Drawing on scholarly research findings, this book presents a cogent case that librarians can use to work towards prioritization of reading in libraries and in schools. Reading is more important than it has ever been—recent research on reading, such as PEW reports and Scholastic's "Kids and Family Reading Report," proves that fact. This new edition of Reading Matters provides powerful evidence that can be used to justify the establishment, maintenance, and growth of pleasure reading collections, both fiction and nonfiction, and of readers' advisory services. The authors assert that reading should be woven into the majority of library activities: reference, collection building, provision of leisure materials, readers' advisory services, storytelling and story time programs, adult literacy programs, and more. This edition also addresses emergent areas of interest, such as e-reading, e-writing, and e-publishing; multiple literacies; visual texts; the ascendancy of young adult fiction; and fan fiction. A new chapter addresses special communities of YA readers. The book will help library administrators and personnel convey the importance of reading to grant-funding agencies, stakeholders, and the public at large. LIS faculty who wish to establish and maintain courses in readers' advisory will find it of particular interest.