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How ordinary forms of writing—including manuals, petitions, almanacs, and magazines—shaped the way colonial subjects understood their place in empire In Required Reading, Priyasha Mukhopadhyay offers a new and provocative history of reading that centers archives of everyday writing from the British empire. Mukhopadhyay rummages in the drawers of bureaucratic offices and the cupboards of publishers in search of how historical readers in colonial South Asia responded to texts ranging from licenses to manuals, how they made sense of them, and what this can tell us about their experiences living in the shadow of a vast imperial power. Taking these engagements seriously, she argues, is the first step to challenging conventional notions of what it means to read.Mukhopadhyay’s account is populated by a cast of characters that spans the ranks of colonial society, from bored soldiers to frustrated bureaucrats. These readers formed close, even intimate relationships with everyday texts. She presents four case studies: a soldier’s manual, a cache of bureaucratic documents, a collection of astrological almanacs, and a women’s literary magazine. Tracking moments in which readers refused to read, were unable to read, and read in part, she uncovers the dizzying array of material, textual, and aural practices these texts elicited. Even selectively read almanacs and impenetrable account books, she finds, were springboards for personal, world-shaping readerly relationships.Untethered from the constraints of conventional literacy, Required Reading reimagines how texts work in the world and how we understand the very idea of reading.

Literacy --- Reader-response criticism --- Colonies --- Acts. --- Almanacs. --- Articles. --- Astrological. --- Bengal. --- Bengali. --- Books. --- British empire. --- Bureaucracy. --- Bureaucratic documents. --- Bureaucratic. --- Ceylon. --- Colonial. --- Community. --- Education. --- Elite. --- Empire. --- Family. --- Functional archive. --- Gun. --- Handbook. --- History of the book. --- History. --- Illiterate. --- Imperial. --- Knowledge. --- Language. --- License. --- Literacy. --- Literate. --- Literature. --- Magazine. --- Manual. --- Military. --- Modern. --- Mulvaney. --- Newspaper. --- Novel. --- Panjika. --- Paperwork. --- Pocket. --- Power. --- Priyasha Mukhopadhyay. --- Publishers. --- Rabindranath Tagore. --- Railway. --- Readers. --- Relationships. --- Reports. --- Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire. --- Silindu. --- Soldiers. --- Space. --- Twentieth century. --- Victorian empire. --- Village. --- War. --- Wolseley. --- Woolf. --- archival histories. --- colonial India. --- colonial South Asia. --- gender. --- history of reading. --- materiality. --- military history. --- postcolonial literature. --- print culture. --- race. --- temporality.

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“In this smart, wide-ranging study of texts on the move, the global history of the book becomes a counter-history of the nation. Rather than pitting one against the other, contributors show how entangled these spheres are – and how key print culture is to illuminating points of convergence and divergence. Moving skillfully between dog-eared volumes and the booksellers, readers and marketplaces that made them, this collection brims with insights about the lives of books and their role not simply in reflecting global relations but in creating them -- with every turn of the page.” — Antoinette M. Burton, Professor of History, University of Illinois, USA, and co-author with Isabel Hofmeyr of Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire. This collection is an edited volume of essays that showcases how books played a crucial role in making and materialising histories of travel, scientific exchanges, translation, and global markets from the late-eighteenth century to the present. While existing book historical practice is overly dependent on models of the local and the national, we suggest that approaching the book as a cross-region, travelling – and therefore global- object offers new approaches and methodologies for a study in global perspective. By thus studying the book in its transnational and inter-imperial, textual, inter-textual and material dimensions, this collection will highlight its key role in making possible a global imagination, shaped by networks of print material, readers, publishers and translators.

Book history --- book history --- co-creation