The Pleasures of Memory: Learning to Read with Charles Dickens - Softcover

Winter, Sarah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0823233537 ISBN 13: 9780823233533

Publisher: Fordham University Press, 2015

Synopsis

What are the sources of the commonly held presumption that reading literature should make people more just, humane, and sophisticated? Rendering literary history responsive to the cultural histories of reading, publishing, and education, The Pleasures of Memory illuminates the ways in which Dickens’s serial fiction shaped not only the popular practice of reading for pleasure and instruction but also the school subject we now know as “English.”
Winter shows how Dickens’s serial fiction instigated specific reading practices by reworking the conventions of religious didactic tracts from which most Victorians learned to read. Incorporating an influential associationist psychology of learning founded on the cumulative functioning of memory, Dickens’s serial novels consistently led readers to reflect on their reading as a form of shared experience.
Dickens’s celebrity authorship, Winter argues, represented both a successful marketing program for popular fiction and a cultural politics addressed to a politically unaffiliated, social-activist Victorian readership. As late-nineteenth century educational reforms consolidated British and American readers into “mass” populations served by state school systems, Dickens’s beloved novels came to embody the socially inclusive and humanizing goals of democratic education.

About this title

About the Author

Sarah Winter is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.

Edition details

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0823233537
• ISBN 13: 9780823233533
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 486