Download or read book A History of Reading written by Alberto Manguel and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-08-26 with total page 557 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A book for book lovers by a true lover of books! At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning, and at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader. Noted essayist and editor Alberto Manguel moves from this essential moment to explore the six-thousand-year-old conversation between words and that hero without whom the book would be a lifeless object: the reader. Manguel brilliantly covers reading as seduction, as rebellion, and as obsession and goes on to trace the quirky and fascinating history of the reader’s progress from clay tablet to scroll, codex to digital.
Download or read book A History of Reading in the West written by Guglielmo Cavallo and published by Univ of Massachusetts Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literature has not always been written in the same ways, nor has it been received or read in the same ways over the course of Western civilization. Cavallo (Greek palaeography, U. of Rome La Sapienza), Chartier (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris) and a number of other international contributors, address themes that highlight the transformation of reading methods and materials over the ages, such as the way texts in the Middle Ages were often written with the voice in mind, as they would have been read aloud, or even sung. Articles explore the innovations in the physical evolution of the book, as well as the growth and development of a broad-based reading public.
Download or read book A History of Reading written by Steven R. Fischer and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Takes in a wonderful diversity of things."-Nature. Now available in paperback, this final volume in the trilogy Language/Writing/Reading traces the complete story of reading from the time when symbols first acquired meaning through to the electronic texts of the digital age.
Download or read book The History of Reading written by Shafquat Towheed and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The History of Reading' offers an accessible overview of this developing discipline, from the rise of literacy through to the current trend of book clubs.
Download or read book The Social Life of Books written by Abigail Williams and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-27 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A lively survey…her research and insights make us conscious of how we, today, use books.”—John Sutherland, The New York Times Book Review Two centuries before the advent of radio, television, and motion pictures, books were a cherished form of popular entertainment and an integral component of domestic social life. In this fascinating and vivid history, Abigail Williams explores the ways in which shared reading shaped the lives and literary culture of the eighteenth century, offering new perspectives on how books have been used by their readers, and the part they have played in middle-class homes and families. Drawing on marginalia, letters and diaries, library catalogues, elocution manuals, subscription lists, and more, Williams offers fresh and fascinating insights into reading, performance, and the history of middle-class home life. “Williams’s charming pageant of anecdotes…conjures a world strikingly different from our own but surprisingly similar in many ways, a time when reading was on the rise and whole worlds sprang up around it.”—TheWashington Post
Download or read book A Reader on Reading written by Alberto Manguel and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-02 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this major collection of his essays, Alberto Manguel, whom George Steiner has called “the Casanova of reading,” argues that the activity of reading, in its broadest sense, defines our species. “We come into the world intent on finding narrative in everything,” writes Manguel, “landscape, the skies, the faces of others, the images and words that our species create.” Reading our own lives and those of others, reading the societies we live in and those that lie beyond our borders, reading the worlds that lie between the covers of a book are the essence of A Reader on Reading. The thirty-nine essays in this volume explore the crafts of reading and writing, the identity granted to us by literature, the far-reaching shadow of Jorge Luis Borges, to whom Manguel read as a young man, and the links between politics and books and between books and our bodies. The powers of censorship and intellectual curiosity, the art of translation, and those “numinous memory palaces we call libraries” also figure in this remarkable collection. For Manguel and his readers, words, in spite of everything, lend coherence to the world and offer us “a few safe places, as real as paper and as bracing as ink,” to grant us room and board in our passage.
Download or read book The Art of Reading written by Jamie Camplin and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 14 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Why do artists love books?” This volume takes this tantalizingly simple question as a starting point to reveal centuries of symbiosis between the visual and literary arts. First looking at the development of printed books and the simultaneous emergence of the modern figure of the artist, The Art of Reading appraises works by the many great masters who took inspiration from the printed word. Authors Jamie Camplin and Maria Ranauro weave together an engaging cultural history that probes the ways in which books and paintings represent a key to understanding ourselves and the past. Paintings contain a world of information about religion, class, gender, and power, but they also reveal details of everyday life often lost in history texts. Such artworks show us not only how books have been valued over time but also how the practice of reading has evolved in Western society. Featuring over one hundred works by artists from across Europe and the United States and all painting genres, The Art of Reading explores the two-thousand-year story of the great painters and the preeminent information-providing, knowledge-endowing, solace-giving, belief-supporting, leisure-enriching, pleasure-delivering medium of all time: the book.
Download or read book A History of Reading and Writing written by Martyn Lyons and published by Red Globe Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wide-ranging overview of the history of reading and writing in western societies from ancient times to the digital age. Author from University of NSW, Australia.
Download or read book A History of Literacy Education written by Robert J. Tierney and published by Teachers College Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The scope and nature of this account of the modern history of reading/literacy education (especially tied to the aspirational readers) are unique. Enlisting the metaphor of waves, it traces monumental shifts in theory, research and practice related to reading education and literacy that represent developments that verge on revolutionary changes. Each of these waves is accompanied with a discussion of the aspirational reader that sets the stage for contemplating these shifts and their significance. The discussions trace the research and theoretical developments in a fashion that exemplifies the origins of the shifts and their influences"--
Download or read book Loving Literature written by Deidre Lynch and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Of the many charges laid against contemporary literary scholars, one of the most common--and perhaps the most wounding--is that they simply don't love books. And while the most obvious response is that, no, actually the profession of literary studies does acknowledge and address personal attachments to literature, that answer risks obscuring a more fundamental question: Why should they? That question led Deidre Shauna Lynch into the historical and cultural investigation of Loving Literature. How did it come to be that professional literary scholars are expected not just to study, but to love literature, and to inculcate that love in generations of students? What Lynch discovers is that books, and the attachments we form to them, have long played a role in the formation of private life--that the love of literature, in other words, is neither incidental to, nor inextricable from, the history of literature. Yet at the same time, there is nothing self-evident or ahistorical about our love of literature: our views of books as objects of affection have clear roots in late eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century publishing, reading habits, and domestic history."--Publisher's Web site.
Download or read book What We Talk About When We Talk About Books written by Leah Price and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2019-08-20 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reports of the death of reading are greatly exaggerated Do you worry that you've lost patience for anything longer than a tweet? If so, you're not alone. Digital-age pundits warn that as our appetite for books dwindles, so too do the virtues in which printed, bound objects once trained us: the willpower to focus on a sustained argument, the curiosity to look beyond the day's news, the willingness to be alone. The shelves of the world's great libraries, though, tell a more complicated story. Examining the wear and tear on the books that they contain, English professor Leah Price finds scant evidence that a golden age of reading ever existed. From the dawn of mass literacy to the invention of the paperback, most readers already skimmed and multitasked. Print-era doctors even forbade the very same silent absorption now recommended as a cure for electronic addictions. The evidence that books are dying proves even scarcer. In encounters with librarians, booksellers and activists who are reinventing old ways of reading, Price offers fresh hope to bibliophiles and literature lovers alike. Winner of the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award, 2020
Download or read book Reading Pictures written by Alberto Manguel and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2003-11-03 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The language in which we speak about art has become steadily more abstruse, though for thousands of years this was not the case, Today, we live in a kaleidoscopic new world of images. Is there a vocabulary we can learn in order to read these images? Is there something we can do so as not to remain passive when we flip through an illustrated book or wander through a gallery, or are there ways in which we can 'read' the stories within paintings, monumnets, buildings and sculptures? We say 'every picture tells a story', but does it? Taking a handful of extraordinary images - photagraphed, painted, built, sculpted - Alberto Manguel explores, with delight and erudition, how each one attempts to tell a story that we, the viewer, must decipher or invent. Whether delving into the love of life in the twentieth-century world of Joan Mitchell, or the brutal complexities of Picasso's treatment of his mistress; revisiting the riddles of the past in the fifteenth-century painting of Robert Campin, or exploring the heartrending life of 'the hairy girl' whose matted fur so astonished sixteenth-century Italy, he helps us to enjoy and explore the visual landscape we live in.
Download or read book Reading History in Children s Books written by Catherine Butler and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-07-17 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a critical account of historical books about Britain written for children, including realist novels, non-fiction, fantasy and alternative histories. It also investigates the literary, ideological and philosophical challenges involved in writing about the past, especially for an audience whose knowledge of history is often limited.
Download or read book What is the History of the Book written by James Raven and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-01-08 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Raven, a leading historian of the book, offers a fresh and accessible guide to the global study of the production, dissemination and reception of written and printed texts across all societies and in all ages. Students, teachers, researchers and general readers will benefit from the book's investigation of the subject's origins, scope and future direction. Based on original research and a wide range of sources, What is the History of the Book? shows how book history crosses disciplinary boundaries and intersects with literary, historical, media, library, conservation and communications studies. Raven uses examples from around the world to explore different traditions in bibliography, palaeography and manuscript studies. He analyses book history's growing global ambition and demonstrates how the study of reading practices opens up new horizons in social history and the history of knowledge. He shows how book history is contributing to debates about intellectual and popular culture, colonialism and the communication of ideas. The first global, accessible introduction to the field of book history from ancient to modern times, What is the History of the Book? is essential reading for all those interested in one of society's most important cultural artefacts.
Download or read book A History of Reading written by Stuart Hylton and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few towns of its size have as rich and varied a history as Reading, and few hide the fact better. For the past two centuries and more growth and modernisation have swept away much of the evidence of the past. But, for a thousand year before that, Reading played a major role in the affairs of the nation. King Alfred fought in the town for control of his kingdom, and in medieval times Reading was an international centre for pilgrimage and governance. Parliaments met here, and kings and princes were married and buried locally. The town has been sacked by Vikings, besieged in the Civil War and saw fighting in the streets during the so-called ?Bloodless Revolution? that overthrew King James II in 1688. Since then, Reading?s fortunes have been transformed by a series of revolutions in transport. The town today serves as an effective illustration of the benefits and the challenges that improvements have brought to the nation as a whole. Its individual character is exemplified by the extraordinary range of people who have lived here, from Thomas a Becket to the most controversial person ever to hold the office of Archbishop of Canterbury, from the man who effectively ran the country through the minority of a king to one of our least competent prime ministers. This lively and well illustrated account of Reading?s colourful history will shed surprising light on the rich past of a community that has never been slow in embracing the future.
Download or read book Power of Reading written by Frank Furedi and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-10-08 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is a natural companion to Christopher Booker`s bestselling The Seven Basic Plots (Continuum) and John Gross`s seminal study The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (Weidenfeld and Nicolson). The most eminent cultural and social historian Frank Furedi presents an eclectic and entirely original history of reading. The very act of reading and the choice of reading material endow individuals with an identity that possesses great symbolic significance. Already in ancient Rome, Cicero was busy drawing up a hierarchy of different types of readers. Since that time people have been divided into a variety of categories- literates and illiterates, intensive and extensive readers, or vulgo and discreet readers. In the 19th Century, accomplished readers were praised as `men of letters` while their moral opposites were described as `unlettered`. Today distinctions are made between cultural and instrumental readers and scorn is communicated towards the infamous `tabloid reader`. The purpose of this book is to explore the changing meanings attributed to the act of reading. Although it has an historical perspective, the book`s focus is very much on the culture of reading that prevails in the 21st Century. There are numerous texts on the history of literacy (Hoggart), yet there is no publication devoted to the the history of readers and their relationship with wider culture and society. It is thus a fascinating insight into understanding the post-Gutenberg debates about literacy in a multimedia environment with such a strong emphasis on the absorption of information. Taking a cue from George Steiner, Furedi argues vigorously for the restoration of the art of reading- every bit as important as the art of writing.
Download or read book The Lost Art of Reading written by David L. Ulin and published by Sasquatch Books. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading is a revolutionary act, an act of engagement in a culture that wants us to disengage. In The Lost Art of Reading, David L. Ulin asks a number of timely questions - why is literature important? What does it offer, especially now? Blending commentary with memoir, Ulin addresses the importance of the simple act of reading in an increasingly digital culture. Reading a book, flipping through hard pages, or shuffling them on screen - it doesn't matter. The key is the act of reading, and it's seriousness and depth. Ulin emphasizes the importance of reflection and pause allowed by stopping to read a book, and the accompanying focus required to let the mind run free in a world that is not one's own. Are we willing to risk our collective interest in contemplation, nuanced thinking, and empathy? Far from preaching to the choir, The Lost Art of Reading is a call to arms, or rather, to pages.
