Introduction

Abstract

This introduction presents each of the 18 chapters in the book. It highlights the type of reading practices and texts under investigation, the geographical focus, the key arguments and the chapters’ contributions to the cultural sociology of reading. It also establishes some of the connections between the chapters. The chapters cover the Anglophone area of the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia; the transnational, multilingual space constituted by the readership of Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez; nineteenth-century Chile; twentieth-century Czech Republic; Swahili readers in East Africa in the twentieth century; contemporary Iran, and China during the Cultural Revolution and the post-Mao period. The authors examine a range of reading practices and modes of reading and contribute to debates about the valuation of literature and the role of cultural intermediaries; the iconic properties of textual objects and of the practice of reading itself; how reading supports personal, social and political reflection, emotional connection and self-fashioning; bookstores as spaces for sociability, individuality and the interplay of high and popular cultures; the political uses of reading for nation-building, propaganda and subject formation, and the dangers and gratifications of reading under state systems of surveillance and repression.

Parts of the presentation of the six chapters originally published in the American Journal of Cultural Sociology’s Special issue on The Cultural Sociology of Reading draw from my editorial introduction to the issue (Exploring the Sacrality of Reading as a Social Practice). Those parts are reproduced with permission from Springer Nature.