Pleasures, Dangers, and Uses: Reading, Subjectivity, and Community in Britain, 1790-1900

In "Pleasures, Dangers, and Uses," I undertake a cross-class and gender analysis of literacy and reading in nineteenth-century Britain. I argue first that the reading public functions both like and in historical partnership with what Benedict Anderson describes as the "imagined community" of the nation-state; in chapters on Edmund Burke, Walter Scott, and the late-nineteenth-century periodical press, I trace the rhetorical and real creation of the reading public, reading problems, and ideal reading practices, as well as the assumed correlations between reading, subjectivity, class, gender, and nation upon which that creation depended. Second, I work to disturb the conceptual unity of the reading public and the social distinctions it encodes by looking at how different communities of nineteenth-century readers acquired, used, and understood their own literacy. In chapters on working-class autobiographies and mutual improvement societies, I explore how social position and material conditions informed how, why, and what people read, as well as the meaning and value that they attributed to the act of reading. While focused primarily on nineteenth-century Britain, the project critically engages, by historicizing, modern assumptions about literacy and reading--assumptions that have organized literary critical, historical, and sociological approaches to reading, popular critiques of mass culture, and the very enterprise of literary criticism and pedagogy in late-twentieth-century U.S.-America.