Reading Cultures (Special issue of the journal Culture as Text to be published in 2026)
Reading Cultures
A special issue of the journal Culture as Text (degruyter.com).
It is common practice among literary scholars to divide their field into a variety of authorial strategies and attachments, e.g. by form, genre, style or literary movement. Romanticism generally makes us think of a set of authors and texts, rather than of a style or culture of reading. This issue looks at another type of categorization: of reading practices, which are always embedded cultural practices.
Most people reading this précis are thoroughly embedded in an institutionalized culture of reading associated with college classroom instruction. The rules are familiar, and are based upon a hierarchy of alleged expertise: the instructor selects the reading materials and determines how they will be read, and in what order. Compare this with the more democratic procedures for selecting readings and soliciting commentary in self-organizing book clubs.
As further examples of reading cultures throughout history, think of the differences between the “poetry parties” and lantern riddles in Dream of Red Chamber, the legend of the mu’allaqat (literally, suspended poems) allegedly “published” by their hanging on the Ka’aba – and allegedly removed by Mohammed when he conquered Mecca; Michel de Montaigne’s self-portrayal as a solitary reader alone in his library ; Emma Bovary who “makes her hands dirty with novels borrowed from old lending libraries” in Gustave Flaubert’s novel, or Leopold Bloom’s synaesthetic absorption of advertising and other scripts, such as a love-letter addressed to his pseudonym, on his walk through Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses.
While self-reflexive literary examples abound, scholarly accounts of reading cultures are relatively rare, for reasons stemming from the necessary time and resources to be expended on such a task, and from the disciplinary boundaries that would assign such studies to history or to sociology rather than to literary criticism. A classic approach to reading (sub)culture remains Janice Radway's Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1984). Radway set out to counter stereotypes of what the romances genre “did” to its putatively exclusively female readership and found a specific reading club in the American Midwest that could be observed and interviewed. More recently, Adam Reed has conducted an analogous study of a contemporary English literary society devoted to discussing the novel cycle of Henry Williamson, in which the focus is almost exclusively on the fiction’s minor characters. Archie L. Dick has provided a glimpse into the “hidden history” of reading in South Africa by consulting a variety of archives: “Bits and pieces from official records, slave wills, travel journals, newspapers,annual reports, readership surveys, biographies, autobiographies, letters, diaries, library records, educational records, illustrations, and interviews were pieced together to tell these hidden stories of South Africa’s common readers and their books. They were hidden because they were simply ignored or neglected, or because people deliberately hid what they were reading” (Dick 9).
Indeed, the majority of research into reading cultures must be done by “piecing together” indirect evidence to construct a mosaic image of the social interactions involved in reading. Direct observation and interviewing such as conducted by Radway and Reed remain a rarity.
Cultural norms of reading may also dictate the range of objects that may be read, beyond colored marks on white pages. In the introduction to their PMLA cluster on Reading Spaces, guest editors Evelyne Ender and Deidre Lynch note that “the most remarkable feature of the new landscape mapped out by recent scholarship on reading may be scholars’ evident interest in broadening the range of textual objects available for study,” including “a range of material— card catalogs, works of visual art, and the sometimes barely legible pencil marks deposited in the margins of printed poems by readers who want to recall in the future their present scene of reading—receive attention as reading matter and as objects of scholarly inquiry. This redirection of attention both transforms reading practices and deines new communities” (Ender 10). Vernacular English has already accounted for this redirection in phrases such as “reading the room,” i.e. practicing Theory of Mind.
Dick, Archie L. The Hidden History of South Africa's Book and Reading Cultures. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2012.
Ender, Evelyne, and Deidre Shauna Lynch. “Introduction to Reading Spaces.” PMLA 134.1 (2019): 9-17.
Reed, Adam. “Reading Minor Characters: An English Literary Society and Its Culture of Investigation.” PMLA 134.1 (2019): 66-80.
Travis, Molly Abel. Reading Cultures?: The Construction of Readers in the Twentieth Century. Southern Illinois University Press, 1998.
Contributions to this issue of 6000 to 8000 words will speak to reading as embedded cultural practice(s), addressing the questions of who reads what, under what circumstances, how do they find their material, and what is the effect of literature on readers? Potential sub-topics embraced by this theme could include:
Sociology and history of reading tastes
Book (and journal, etc.) history
Reading Influencers and Peer-to-Peer Networks (Goodreads, Oprah, Booktubers, Booktokers, etc.)
Pedagogies of Literature and Bibliotherapies
Government interventions to influence reading habits (e.g., literacy campaigns, translation subventions)
Literacy in the Information Age
Reading under Duress (prison, slavery, colonialism, cults)
Reading the Room (and everything/everyone in it)
Schedule:
· 15 December 2024. 200-300 word abstract for article plus biosketch to guest editor (tob@psu.edu)
· 15 January 2025. Invitations issued to 10 to 12 contributors for full articles of 6000 to 8000 words each.
· 1 August 2025. Article drafts due for special issue
· 15 August 2025. Acceptances or requests for revision sent to authors
· 31 August 2025. Complete special issue sent to press.
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/cat/html
Thomas Oliver Beebee