{"title":"\"To do a little and well\": Anne Lister's Reading Routine","authors":"Charles Matthews","doi":"10.5325/reception.15.1.0025","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Bibliophiles often imagine a pre-digital golden age of undistracted reading, but recent scholarship in the history of reading has refuted the existence of this past idyll. This short article introduces the diaries of Anne Lister (1791–1840) as a useful case study for considering how historical readers managed and worried about their intellectual time, and how this process was influenced by competing social pressures. The article discusses some episodes from the diaries that suggest that reading was subject to class-based expectations about the economy of time during this period, and that Lister carefully managed their reading time to develop a modern gentlemanly persona as part of their endeavor to inherit their uncle's estate.","PeriodicalId":40584,"journal":{"name":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1000,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.5325/reception.15.1.0025","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
abstract:Bibliophiles often imagine a pre-digital golden age of undistracted reading, but recent scholarship in the history of reading has refuted the existence of this past idyll. This short article introduces the diaries of Anne Lister (1791–1840) as a useful case study for considering how historical readers managed and worried about their intellectual time, and how this process was influenced by competing social pressures. The article discusses some episodes from the diaries that suggest that reading was subject to class-based expectations about the economy of time during this period, and that Lister carefully managed their reading time to develop a modern gentlemanly persona as part of their endeavor to inherit their uncle's estate.
期刊介绍:
Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History is a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal published once a year. It seeks to promote dialog and discussion among scholars engaged in theoretical and practical analyses in several related fields: reader-response criticism and pedagogy, reception study, history of reading and the book, audience and communication studies, institutional studies and histories, as well as interpretive strategies related to feminism, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and postcolonial studies, focusing mainly but not exclusively on the literature, culture, and media of England and the United States.