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.

This book publishes, for the first time, some 400 letters between Edith Wharton and her chief London publisher, Macmillan. The correspondence highlights Wharton's determination to be taken seriously as a novelist, as well as her exceptionally developed understanding of the "sociology text" in the early twentieth century, casting new light on Wharton's working practices which will be of crucial importance for scholars. The letters offer readers a valuable and intimate insight into transatlantic publishing practices in the period.

The History of Reading offers an engaging, accessible overview from the rise of literacy through to the current trend of a ~book clubsa (TM).

Divided into seven sections, each with a useful introduction, this Reader:

• summarises the main debates and perspectives shaping the field
• introduces key theorists such as Iser, Fish and Bakhtin
• surveys influential works and outlines important studies on mass reading
• focuses on specific communities such as Welsh miners, African American library users and Australian convicts
• looks at individual readers from a variety of countries, classes and historical periods
• considers current research in the history of reading.

Providing both a clear introduction to the history of the field and a taster of the breadth, diversity and vitality of current debates, this Reader is an essential resource for undergraduates, graduates, and researchers.

Bookshelves in the Age of the COVID-19 Pandemic provides the first detailed scholarly investigation of the cultural phenomenon of bookshelves (and the social practices around them) since the start of the pandemic in March 2020. With a foreword by Lydia Pyne, author of Bookshelf (2016), the volume brings together 17 scholars from 6 countries (Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, and the USA) with expertise in literary studies, book history, publishing, visual arts, and pedagogy to critically examine the role of bookshelves during the current pandemic. This volume interrogates the complex relationship between the physical book and its digital manifestation via online platforms, a relationship brought to widespread public and scholarly attention by the global shift to working from home and the rise of online pedagogy. It also goes beyond the (digital) bookshelf to consider bookselling, book accessibility, and pandemic reading habits.

The History of Reading offers an engaging, accessible overview from the rise of literacy through to the current trend of ?book clubs?.

Divided into seven sections, each with a useful introduction, this Reader:

• summarises the main debates and perspectives shaping the field
• introduces key theorists such as Iser, Fish and Bakhtin
• surveys influential works and outlines important studies on mass reading
• focuses on specific communities such as Welsh miners, African American library users and Australian convicts
• looks at individual readers from a variety of countries, classes and historical periods
• considers current research in the history of reading.

Providing both a clear introduction to the history of the field and a taster of the breadth, diversity and vitality of current debates, this Reader is an essential resource for undergraduates, graduates, and researchers.

Arthur Conan Doyle's second Sherlock Holmes novel is both a detective story and an imperial romance. Ostensibly the story of Mary Morstan, a beautiful young woman enlisting the help of Holmes to find her vanished father and solve the mystery of her receipt of a perfect pearl on the same date each year, it gradually uncovers a tale of treachery and human greed. The action audaciously ranges from penal settlements on the Andaman Islands to the suburban comfort of South London, and from the opium-fuelled violence of Agra Fort during the Indian 'Mutiny' to the cocaine-induced contemplation of Holmes' own Baker Street.This Broadview Edition places Doyle's tale in the cultural, political, and social contexts of late nineteenth-century colonialism and imperialism. The appendices provide a wealth of relevant extracts from hard-to-find sources, including official reports, memoirs, newspaper editorials, and anthropological studies.

The contributions to this book amply demonstrate the richness, vitality, and complexity of the colonial transactions between Britain and India over the last two centuries, and they do so by approaching the topic from a specific perspective: by interpreting the rubric 'new readings' as broadly, creatively, and productively as possible. They cover a wide range of literary responses and genres: eighteenth-century drama, the gothic novel, verse, autobiography, history, religious writing, journalism, women's memoirs, travel writing, popular fiction, and the modernist novel. Brought together in one volume, these essays offer a small, but representative sample of the multifaceted literary and cultural traffic between Britain and India in the colonial period. In the richness and diversity of the various contributors' strategies and interpretations, these new readings urge us to return once again to texts that we think we know, as well as to explore those that we do not, with a freshly renewed sense of their complexity, immediacy, and relevance.

The second volume in the "Reading and Studying Literature "series, co-published with the Open University, introduces students to European romanticism and Victorian culture. Each period is discussed in terms of an overarching theme, providing a clear focus for study and discussion and introducing readers to an important theoretical concept in literary studies.

European romanticism is approached through a consideration of the evolution of the idea of the romantic author and the romantic inner life, using readings from Wordsworth on Grasmere, Shelley lyric poetry and Thomas de Quincey's "Confessions of an English Opium Eater." The book goes on to explore Victorian culture through a reading of ideas of 'home' and 'abroad', in the work of Emily Bronte, Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson. The featured theoretical concept of this volume is 'the author'.