Bodies and Books–Now Available

06/20/2012 | | American History & Studies, Book History, Literature & Cultural Studies, New Titles

Bodies and Books: Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth-Century America
Gillian Silverman
256 pages | 6 x 9 | 3 illus.
Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4415-1 | $55.00 | £36.00

"Gillian Silverman's lively study of reading practices in the nineteenth-century United States provides excellent analyses of books and readers alike. How readers could experience 'communion' as both an absorption in each other and a way to absorb books provides a fascinating new understanding of what it means to read. Examining both familiar authors such as Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and Henry David Thoreau and newly reinterpreted authors like Mary Austin and Susan B. Warner, Silverman offers a fresh way to understand the forms of intimacy their works provide."–Shirley Samuels, Cornell University

Bodies and Books–Now Available

05/30/2012 | | Literature & Cultural Studies

Bodies and Books: Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth-Century America
Gillian Silverman
256 pages | 6 x 9 | 3 illus.
Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4415-1 | $55.00 | £36.00

This book argues that the practice of reading in nineteenth-century America was rooted in fantasies of communion. In handling a book, the reader imagined touching and being touched by the people affiliated with that book's narrative world. This could lead to a therapeutic sense of oneness with an author, a reader, or the material book itself. Read more . . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson.
Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Books

Authors

On The Site

Bodies and Books–Now Available

Bodies and Books–Now Available

Forthcoming Events