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"The idea that there is a relation between media and time is a familiar one. It is often said that digital technologies have quickened the pace at which we consume information in the modern world. In Christina Lupton's Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century, she looks back to the eighteenth century to demonstrate the ways in which the emerging print culture and modes of reading and writing affected the experience and understanding of time. Placing canonical works by Jane Austen, Elizabeth Inchbald, Henry Fielding, and Samuel Johnson alongside those of lesser known authors and readers, Lupton approaches books as objects that are good at attracting particular forms of attention. In contrast to the digital interfaces of our own moment and the newspapers and pamphlets read during the period, books are rarely seen as shaping or keeping modern time. However, Lupton argues that books are often put down and picked up at regular times, they are leafed through as well as read sequentially, and they are handed on as objects designed to bridge distances. In showing how discourse itself engages with these material practices, Lupton makes the case that reading is something to be studied textually as well as historically" --

Time --- Book industries and trade --- Books and reading --- Appraisal of books --- Books --- Choice of books --- Evaluation of literature --- Literature --- Reading, Choice of --- Reading and books --- Reading habits --- Reading public --- Reading --- Reading interests --- Reading promotion --- Book trade --- Cultural industries --- Manufacturing industries --- Hours (Time) --- Geodetic astronomy --- Nautical astronomy --- Horology --- Psychological aspects --- History. --- History --- Social aspects --- Appraisal --- Evaluation

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Literature

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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.

Books and reading --- Books and reading. --- COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020 --- -COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020 --- -Social aspects. --- Social aspects --- Social aspects. --- Since 2020. --- Denmark. --- Great Britain.