BiblioVault - Books about Books and reading

Sacred Stacks

The Higher Purpose of Libraries and Librarianship

Nancy Kalikow Maxwell

American Library Association, 2006

Scarlett's Women

Gone With the Wind and Its Female Fans

Taylor, Helen

Rutgers University Press, 1989

One of the most successful books ever published and the basis of one of the most popular and highly praised Hollywood films, Gone with the Wind has entered world culture in a way that few other stories have. The book was published in June 1936; the film premiered on December 15, 1939. The book has sold 25 million copies, has been translated into twenty-seven languages, and won the 1936 Pulitzer Prize. The film received eight Oscars and has been called the greatest movie ever made. Everyone has heard of GWTW. Most of us have seen the movie or read the novel. In this entertaining and informative book, Helen Taylor is the first to seek reasons for the film/novel's success among viewers/readers. The author asked GWTW fans to relate their experiences with the works, to explain their fascination with the story, to describe the impact GWTW has had on their lives. The results are astonishing and illuminating. In the United States and England, where the author conducted her research, women have to a remarkable degree claimed the story Margaret Mitchell wrote as their own. They name their children Rhett and Scarlett. They see in the lives of the men and women of GWTW their own lives, their own restlessness, their own aspirations for something better than marriage and motherhood. Helen Taylor not only explains the enduring appeal of the work, but also identifies different kinds of response at particular historical moments (especially World War II) and through the past five decades by women of different classes, races, and generations. The author also looks at the contemporary implications of the work's political conservatism, racism, and--paradoxically--feminism. The result is a book that is sophisticated, accessible, and revealing. Scarlett's Women is a book for eery fan, and for all students of film and popular culture.

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Scarlett's Women

Gone With the Wind and Its Female Fans

Taylor, Helen

Rutgers University Press, 1989

One of the most successful books ever published and the basis of one of the most popular and highly praised Hollywood films, Gone with the Wind has entered world culture in a way that few other stories have. The book was published in June 1936; the film premiered on December 15, 1939. The book has sold 25 million copies, has been translated into twenty-seven languages, and won the 1936 Pulitzer Prize. The film received eight Oscars and has been called the greatest movie ever made. Everyone has heard of GWTW. Most of us have seen the movie or read the novel. In this entertaining and informative book, Helen Taylor is the first to seek reasons for the film/novel's success among viewers/readers. The author asked GWTW fans to relate their experiences with the works, to explain their fascination with the story, to describe the impact GWTW has had on their lives. The results are astonishing and illuminating. In the United States and England, where the author conducted her research, women have to a remarkable degree claimed the story Margaret Mitchell wrote as their own. They name their children Rhett and Scarlett. They see in the lives of the men and women of GWTW their own lives, their own restlessness, their own aspirations for something better than marriage and motherhood. Helen Taylor not only explains the enduring appeal of the work, but also identifies different kinds of response at particular historical moments (especially World War II) and through the past five decades by women of different classes, races, and generations. The author also looks at the contemporary implications of the work's political conservatism, racism, and--paradoxically--feminism. The result is a book that is sophisticated, accessible, and revealing. Scarlett's Women is a book for eery fan, and for all students of film and popular culture.

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The Sign of the Cannibal

Melville and the Making of a Postcolonial Reader

Geoffrey Sanborn

Duke University Press, 1998

In The Sign of the Cannibal Geoffrey Sanborn offers a major reassessment of the work of Herman Melville, a definitive history of the post-Enlightenment discourse on cannibalism, and a provocative contribution to postcolonial theory. These investigations not only explore mid–nineteenth century resistance to the colonial enterprise but argue that Melville, using the discourse on cannibalism to critique colonialism, contributed to the production of resistance.
Sanborn focuses on the representations of cannibalism in three of Melville’s key texts—Typee, Moby-Dick, and “Benito Cereno.” Drawing on accounts of Pacific voyages from two centuries and virtually the entire corpus of the post-Enlightenment discourse on cannibalism, he shows how Melville used his narratives to work through the ways in which cannibalism had been understood. In so doing, argues Sanborn, Melville sought to move his readers through stages of possible responses to the phenomenon in order to lead them to consider alternatives to established assumptions and conventions—to understand that in the savage they see primarily their own fear and fascination. Melville thus becomes a narrator of the postcolonial encounter as he uncovers the dynamic of dread and menace that marks the Western construction of the “non-savage” human.
Extending the work of Slavoj Zizek and Homi Bhabha while providing significant new insights into the work of Melville, The Sign of the Cannibal represents a breakthrough for students and scholars of postcolonial theory, American literary history, critical anthropology, race, and masculinity.

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Slow Reading in a Hurried Age

David Mikics

Harvard University Press, 2013

Wrapped in the glow of the computer or phone screen, we cruise websites; we skim and skip. We glance for a brief moment at whatever catches our eye and then move on. Slow Reading in a Hurried Age reminds us of another mode of reading--the kind that requires our full attention and that has as its goal not the mere gathering of information but the deeper understanding that only good books can offer.

Slow Reading in a Hurried Age is a practical guide for anyone who yearns for a more meaningful and satisfying reading experience, and who wants to sharpen reading skills and improve concentration. David Mikics, a noted literary scholar, demonstrates exactly how the tried-and-true methods of slow reading can provide a more immersive, fulfilling experience. He begins with fourteen preliminary rules for slow reading and shows us how to apply them. The rules are followed by excursions into key genres, including short stories, novels, poems, plays, and essays.

Reading, Mikics says, should not be drudgery, and not mere escape either, but a way to live life at a higher pitch. A good book is a pathway to finding ourselves, by getting lost in the words and works of others.

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Something Musical Happened at the Library

Rob Reid

American Library Association, 2007

The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf

Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines

Marat Grinberg

Brandeis University Press, 2022

An original investigation into the reading strategies and uses of books by Jews in the Soviet era.

In The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf, Marat Grinberg argues that in an environment where Judaism had been all but destroyed, and a public Jewish presence routinely delegitimized, reading uniquely provided many Soviet Jews with an entry to communal memory and identity. The bookshelf was both a depository of selective Jewish knowledge and often the only conspicuously Jewish presence in their homes. The typical Soviet Jewish bookshelf consisted of a few translated works from Hebrew and numerous translations from Yiddish and German as well as Russian books with both noticeable and subterranean Jewish content. Such volumes, officially published, and not intended solely for a Jewish audience, afforded an opportunity for Soviet Jews to indulge insubordinate feelings in a largely safe manner. Grinberg is interested in pinpointing and decoding the complex reading strategies and the specifically Jewish uses to which the books on the Soviet Jewish bookshelf were put. He reveals that not only Jews read them, but Jews read them in a specific way.

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Staged Readings

Contesting Class in Popular American Theater and Literature, 1835-75

Michael D’Alessandro

University of Michigan Press, 2022

Staged Readings studies the social consequences of 19th-century America’s two most prevalent leisure forms: theater and popular literature. In the midst of watershed historical developments—including numerous waves of immigration, two financial Panics, increasing wealth disparities, and the Civil War—American theater and literature were developing at unprecedented rates. Playhouses became crowded with new spectators, best-selling novels flew off the shelves, and, all the while, distinct social classes began to emerge. While the middle and upper classes were espousing conservative literary tastes and attending family matinees and operas, laborers were reading dime novels and watching downtown spectacle melodramas like Nymphs of the Red Sea and The Pirate’s Signal or, The Bridge of Death!!! As audiences traveled from the reading parlor to the playhouse (and back again), they accumulated a vital sense of social place in the new nation. In other words, culture made class in 19th-century America.

Based in the historical archive, Staged Readings presents a panoramic display of mid-century leisure and entertainment. It examines best-selling novels, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and George Lippard’s The Quaker City. But it also analyzes a series of sensational melodramas, parlor theatricals, doomsday speeches, tableaux vivant displays, curiosity museum exhibits, and fake volcano explosions. These oft-overlooked spectacles capitalized on consumers’ previous cultural encounters and directed their social identifications. The book will be particularly appealing to those interested in histories of popular theater, literature and reading, social class, and mass culture.

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STEP into Storytime

Saroj Nadkarni Ghoting

American Library Association, 2014

The Story Within Us

Women Prisoners Reflect on Reading

Edited by Megan Sweeney

University of Illinois Press, 2012

This volume features in-depth, oral interviews with eleven incarcerated women, each of whom offers a narrative of her life and her reading experiences within prison walls. The women share powerful stories about their complex and diverse efforts to negotiate difficult relationships, exercise agency in restrictive circumstances, and find meaning and beauty in the midst of pain. Their shared emphases on abuse, poverty, addiction, and mental illness illuminate the pathways that lead many women to prison and suggest possibilities for addressing the profound social problems that fuel crime.

Framing the narratives within an analytic introduction and reflective afterword, Megan Sweeney highlights the crucial intellectual work that the incarcerated women perform despite myriad restrictions on reading and education in U.S. prisons. These women use the limited reading materials available to them as sources of guidance and support and as tools for self-reflection and self-education. Through their creative engagements with books, the women learn to reframe their own life stories, situate their experiences in relation to broader social patterns, deepen their understanding of others, experiment with new ways of being, and maintain a sense of connection with their fellow citizens on both sides of the prison fence.

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Storytimes for Everyone!

Developing Young Children's Language and Literacy

Saroj Nadkarni Ghoting

American Library Association, 2013

Suburban Plots

Men at Home in Nineteenth-Century American Print Culture

Maura D'Amore

University of Massachusetts Press, 2014

In the middle of the nineteenth century, as Americans contended with rapid industrial and technological change, readers relied on periodicals and books for information about their changing world. Within this print culture, a host of writers, editors, architects, and reformers urged men to commute to and from their jobs in the city, which was commonly associated with overcrowding, disease, and expense. Through a range of materials, from pattern books to novels and a variety of periodicals, men were told of the restorative effects on body and soul of the natural environment, found in the emerging suburbs outside cities such as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. They were assured that the promise of an ideal home, despite its association with women's work, could help to motivate them to engage in the labor and commute that took them away from it each day.

In Suburban Plots, Maura D'Amore explores how Henry David Thoreau, Henry Ward Beecher, Donald Grant Mitchell, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and others utilized the pen to plot opportunities for a new sort of male agency grounded, literarily and spatially, in a suburbanized domestic landscape. D'Amore uncovers surprising narratives that do not fit easily into standard critical accounts of midcentury home life. Taking men out of work spaces and locating them in the domestic sphere, these writers were involved in a complex process of portraying men struggling to fulfill fantasies outside of their professional lives, in newly emerging communities. These representations established the groundwork for popular conceptions of suburban domestic life that remain today.

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Sylvia Plath and the Mythology of Women Readers

Janet Badia

University of Massachusetts Press, 2011

Depicted in popular films, television series, novels, poems, and countless media reports, Sylvia Plath's women readers have become nearly as legendary as Plath herself, in large part because the depictions are seldom kind. If one is to believe the narrative told by literary and popular culture, Plath's primary audience is a body of young, misguided women who uncritically—even pathologically—consume Plath's writing with no awareness of how they harm the author's reputation in the process.

Janet Badia investigates the evolution of this narrative, tracing its origins, exposing the gaps and elisions that have defined it, and identifying it as a bullying mythology whose roots lie in a long history of ungenerous, if not outright misogynistic, rhetoric about women readers that has gathered new energy from the backlash against contemporary feminism.

More than just an exposé of our cultural biases against women readers, Badia's research also reveals how this mythology has shaped the production, reception, and evaluation of Plath's body of writing, affecting everything from the Hughes family's management of Plath's writings to the direction of Plath scholarship today. Badia discusses a wide range of texts and issues whose significance has gone largely unnoticed, including the many book reviews that have been written about Plath's publications; films and television shows that depict young Plath readers; editorials and fan tributes written about Plath; and Ted and (daughter) Frieda Hughes's writings about Plath's estate and audience.

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