Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain, 1914-1950
Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain, 1914-1950

Author: Joseph McAleer

Publisher: Oxford [England] : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13:

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Before the advent of television, reading was among the most popular of leisure activities. Light fiction--romances, thrillers, westerns--was the sustenance of millions in wartime and in peace. This lively and scholarly study examines the size and complexion of the reading public and the development of an increasingly commercialized publishing industry through the first half of the twentieth century. Joseph McAleer uses a variety of sources, from the Mass-Observation Archive to previously confidential publishers' records, to explore the nature of popular fiction and its readers. He analyzes the editorial policies which created the success of Mills & Boon, publishers of romantic fiction, and D. C. Thomson, the genius behind The Hotspur and other magazines for boys, and also charts the rise and fall of the Religious Tract Society, creator of the legendary Boy's Own Paper, as a popular publisher.

Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in England, 1880-1914
Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in England, 1880-1914

Author: Mary Hammond

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 9780754656685

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Between 1880 and 1914, England saw the emergence of an unprecedented range of new literary forms, which meant new relationships between books, authors, readers and classifications of taste. Hammond uses previously unexamined archive material and focuses in detail on the working practices of selected publishers and distributors to make an original and important contribution to our understanding of the cultural dynamics and rhetorics of the fin-de-siècle literary field in England.

Publishers, Readers and the Great War
Publishers, Readers and the Great War

Author: Vincent Trott

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-10-05

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1474291503

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Literature is at the heart of popular understandings of the First World War in Britain, and has perpetuated a popular memory of the conflict centred on disillusionment, horror and futility. This book examines how and why literature has had this impact, exploring the role played by authors, publishers and readers in constructing the memory of the war since 1918. It demonstrates that publishers were as influential as authors in shaping perceptions of the conflict, and it provides a detailed analysis of critical and popular responses to war books, tracing the evolution of readers' attitudes to the war between 1918 and 2014. By exploring the cultural legacy of the war from these two previously overlooked perspectives, Vincent Trott offers fresh insights regarding the emergence of a collective memory of the First World War in Britain. Drawing on a broad range of primary source material, including publishers' correspondence, dust jackets, adverts, book reviews and diary entries, and examining canonical authors such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Vera Brittain alongside long-forgotten texts and more recent autobiographical works by Harry Patch and Henry Allingham, Publishers, Readers and the Great War provides a rich and nuanced analysis of the climate within which First World War literature was written, published and received since 1918.

The Romantic Fiction Of Mills & Boon, 1909-1995
The Romantic Fiction Of Mills & Boon, 1909-1995

Author: Dixon, Jay

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-23

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 1134217374

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This study to analyzes romantic fiction's depiction of women as part of the broader history of ideas about women.; Given the success of the Mills & Boon romance, their portrayal of subjects like sex, love, marriage, class, motherhood and femineity are important cultural barometers and make interesting study.; The author shows how all these themes have an historical trajectory and how these novels have come to reflect feminist concerns.; Based on a study of over 1000 Mills & Boon romances the book provides analysis of plot types and shows how these have changed in response to women's own changing position within society.

Reading and the First World War
Reading and the First World War

Author: Shafquat Towheed

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-08-17

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1137302712

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Ranging from soldiers reading newspapers at the front to authors' responses to the war, this book sheds new light on the reading habits and preferences of men and women, combatants and civilians, during the First World War. This is the first study of the conflict from the perspective of readers.

Edinburgh History of Reading
Edinburgh History of Reading

Author: Jonathan Rose

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2020-04-02

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 1474461891

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Reveals the experience of reading in many cultures and across the agesShows the experiences of ordinary readers in Scotland, Australasia, Russia, and ChinaExplores how digital media has transformed literary criticismPortrays everyday reading in art Includes reading across national and cultural linesCommon Readers casts a fascinating light on the literary experiences of ordinary people: miners in Scotland, churchgoers in Victorian London, workers in Czarist Russia, schoolgirls in rural Australia, farmers in Republican China, and forward to today's online book discussion groups. Chapters in this volume explore what they read, and how books changed their lives.

The Library
The Library

Author: Arthur der Weduwen

Publisher: Profile Books

Published: 2021-10-14

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 1788163443

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LONGLISTED FOR THE HISTORICAL WRITERS' ASSOCIATION NON-FICTION CROWN A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 'A sweeping, absorbing history, deeply researched, of that extraordinary and enduring phenomenon: the library' Richard Ovenden, author of Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge under Attack Famed across the known world, jealously guarded by private collectors, built up over centuries, destroyed in a single day, ornamented with gold leaf and frescoes or filled with bean bags and children's drawings - the history of the library is rich, varied and stuffed full of incident. In this, the first major history of its kind, Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen explore the contested and dramatic history of the library, from the famous collections of the ancient world to the embattled public resources we cherish today. Along the way, they introduce us to the antiquarians and philanthropists who shaped the world's great collections, trace the rise and fall of fashions and tastes, and reveal the high crimes and misdemeanours committed in pursuit of rare and valuable manuscripts.

The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett

Author: Thomas Recchio

Publisher: Anthem Press

Published: 2020-05-02

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1785273647

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Frances Hodgson Burnett is remembered today as the author of the children’s classic The Secret Garden, but in her lifetime she had a long and successful career as a novelist, dramatist and writer of children’s stories. Of high literary quality, her novels covered a range of genres, including industrial novels, American-themed social novels, historical novels, transatlantic novels and post–World War I novels. The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett reads her novels in the context of the changing literary field in England and the United States in the years between the death of George Eliot in 1880 through to the Great War. Read as a body of literary fiction in relation to Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry James and T. S. Eliot among others, and read in the context of literary realism, historical fiction, the sensation novel and so on, Burnett’s novels constitute an important thread that chronicles the changing contexts and forms of English and American fiction from the end of the Victorian period to the Jazz Age of the 1920s.

Bestsellers
Bestsellers

Author: C. Bloom

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2008-09-29

Total Pages: 445

ISBN-13: 0230583873

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This essential guide, now available in a fully updated new edition, is the only available study of all bestselling books, authors and genres since the start of the last century, giving an unique insight into a hundred years of publishing and reading and taking us on a journey into the heart of the British imagination.