Drawing on a study of novel readers in Denmark and the UK during the Covid-19 pandemic, this book provides a snapshot of a phenomenal moment in modern history. The ethnographic approach shows what no account of books published during the pandemic will be able to capture, namely the movement of readers between new purchases and books long kept in their collections. The book follows readers who have tuned into novels about plague, apocalypse, and racial violence, but also readers whose taste for older novels has grown. Alternating between chapters that analyse single texts that were popular (Camus’s The Plague, Ali Smith’s Summer, Brontë’s Jane Eyre) and others that describe clusters of, for example, dystopian fiction and nature writing, this work brings out the diverse quality of the Covid-19 bookshelf. Time is important to this study, both in terms of the time of lockdown and the temporality of reading itself within this wider disrupted sense of time. By exploring these varied experiences, this book investigates the larger question of how the consumption of novels depends on and shapes people’s experience of non-work time, providing a specific lens through which to examine the phenomenology of reading more generally. This work also negotiates debates in the study of reading that distinguish theoretically between critical reading and reading for pleasure, between professional and lay reading. All sides of the sociological and literary debate must be brought to bear in understanding what readers tell us about the novels important to them in this complex historical moment.
The version presented here may differ from the published version or, version of record, if you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the 'permanent WRAP URL' above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription.
This article explores two sets of convergences: one between skeptical and commonsense philosophies in the eighteenth century, and the other between poststructuralist and eighteenth-century philosophies. It argues that all of these forms of reasoning share an interest in the paper on which they are printed. Although they use the case in point of paper quite differently, James Beattie, David Hume, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida all end up in terrain on which paper shows the connection of high theory to the common sense of material cultural studies. They all demonstrate, in other words, how paper and the ink it holds offer evidence of an irrefutable reality even as their example introduces an inevitable slipperiness to the field of example.
A note on versions:The version presented here may differ from the published version or, version of record, if you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the 'permanent WRAP URL' above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription. Habermas, Foucault, Said, and Derrida all lay special weight upon the period as one from which we must break away or make our peace. Latour joins this influential list of scholars for whom the Enlightenment remains key to understanding, and perhaps to overcoming, the modern terms of existence. The argument for which he is best known, that the distinction between subject and object is the lie on which modernity is based, traces that lie to the long eighteenth century. It was here, Latour notes, that distinctions between mind and matter, res cogitans and res extensa, were worked out in the first place. In this light, a special issue on Latour's relevance to eighteenthcentury literature follows a trajectory that Latour himself endorses.The eighteenth century has been seen by many as registering a break between, on the one hand, a confidence in the integrity of the modern subject, and, on the other, a serene satisfaction with the concreteness of the modern object. This is, in Latour's project, the place where modernity got off track. Latour's sense of the vibrant primacy of networks of persons and things, of the co-implication of humans and nonhumans in collectives, is designed to stitch up this gap. But it also reminds us that the image of the eighteenth century as a site of their separation is merely a caricature.Latour invites us to revisit the early decades of modernity as a period actively feeling its way through the manifold crossings between persons and things, sometimes attempting to disentangle them, but also often not. It is with this sense of productive
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