Reading Communities from Salons to Cyberspace

Building upon the influential work of book historians who question the assumption of the isolated individual reader, the authors in Reading Communities from Salons to Cyberspace draw attention to the relationships readers forge with one another and demonstrate how these social interactions influence the very personal relationship one enjoys with a book. Along with the assumption that shared reading is both a social process and a social formation, there are three distinct links evident in the reading communities presented in this collection: the notion of community, and questions about what constitutes community; the role of education; and mixed-method forms of inquiry. The authors present cogent and lively discussions of a wide cariety of communal reading practices, and in the process demonstrate that intellectual rewards accrue when we set aside obstructive disciplinary, theoretical and methodological assumptions.