Guided by the thesis that literature can transform social reality, Tirana Modern draws on ethnographic and historical material to examine the public culture of reading in modern Albania. Formulated as a question, the topic of the book is: How has Albanian literature and literary translation shaped social action during the longue duree of Albanian modernity? Drawing on material from the independent Albanian publisher, Pika pa siperfaqe ("Point without Surface"), Tirana Modern provides a tightly focused ethnography of literary culture in Albania that brings into relief the more general dialectic between social imagination and social reality as mediated by reading and literature.

This edited volume examines what the classic text The Ethnography of Reading (Boyarin ed., 1993), and the diverse ethnographies of reading it helped inspire, can offer contemporary scholars interested in understanding the place of reading in social life. The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty brings together new research and critical reflections from an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars who have kept their ears tuned to the voices in and around the texts they encountered and constructed in the process of bringing the ethnography of reading into the twenty-first century. Rather than operating from universalist assumptions about how people interact with and make meaning from written texts, each of the present contributors draw in one way or another on the theoretical, methodological, and creative legacies of The Ethnography of Reading. Under the broad umbrella of ethnographic reader studies, they collectively explore new relations between texts, social imagination, and social action.

Guided by the thesis that literature can transform social reality, Tirana Modern draws on ethnographic and historical material to examine the public culture of reading in modern Albania. Formulated as a question, the topic of the book is: How has Albanian literature and literary translation shaped social action during the longue duree of Albanian modernity? Drawing on material from the independent Albanian publisher, Pika pa siperfaqe ("Point without Surface"), Tirana Modern provides a tightly focused ethnography of literary culture in Albania that brings into relief the more general dialectic between social imagination and social reality as mediated by reading and literature.