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.
Keywords
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.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Alexander, J. and Smith, P. (2003) The strong program in cultural sociology: elements of a structural hermeneutics. In J. Alexander The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 11–26.
Alexander, J. (2008) “Iconic experience in art and life: Surface/depth beginning with Giacometti’s Standing Woman.” Theory, culture & society 25 (5): 1–19.
Bennett, A. (ed). (1995) Readers and Reading. London and New York: Longman.
Childress, C. (2017) Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Felski, R. (2015). The Limits of Critique. Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press.
Gomart, E., and A. Hennion. (1999) “A sociology of attachment: music amateurs, drug users.” The sociological review 47(1): 220–247.
Jacobs, R.N. (2012) Entertainment media and the aesthetic public sphere. In Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology, ed. J. Alexander, R. Jacobs, and P. Smith, 318–342. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lungina, L. (2014) Word for Word: A Translator’s Memoir of Literature, Politics, and Survival in Soviet Russia. ABRAMS.
Rose, J. (2001) The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Taylor, C. (1989) Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thumala Olave, M. A. (2018) Reading Matters. Towards a Cultural Sociology of Reading. American Journal of Cultural Sociology 63: 417–454.
Thumala Olave, M. A. (2020) Book Love. A Cultural Sociological Interpretation of the Attachment to Books. Poetics 81: 1–11.
Thumala Olave, M.A. (2021) Exploring the sacrality of reading as a social practice. Editorial Special Issue The Cultural Sociology of Reading. American Journal of Cultural Sociology 9: 99–114.
Von Zitzewitz, J. (2020) The Culture of Samizdat: Literature and Underground Networks in the Late Soviet Union. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Thumala Olave, M.A. (2022). Introduction. In: Thumala Olave, M.A. (eds) The Cultural Sociology of Reading. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13227-8_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13227-8_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-13226-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-13227-8
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)