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About the Authors

The market for print steadily expanded throughout the eighteenth-century Atlantic world thanks to printers' efforts to ensure that ordinary people knew how to read and use printed matter. Reading is and was a collection of practices, performed in diverse, but always very specific ways. These practices were spread down the social hierarchy through printed guides. Eve Tavor Bannet explores guides to six manners or methods of reading, each with its own social, economic, commercial, intellectual and pedagogical functions, and each promoting a variety of fragmentary and discontinuous reading practices. The increasingly widespread production of periodicals, pamphlets, prefaces, conduct books, conversation-pieces and fictions, together with schoolbooks designed for adults and children, disseminated all that people of all ages and ranks might need or wish to know about reading, and prepared them for new jobs and roles both in Britain and America.

Explains for the first time why and how people were taught to read in the eighteenth century

Provides a rich study of instruction in reading in eighteenth-century print publications

Connects eighteenth-century reading habits with those of the twenty-fist century where discontinuous forms dominate online and in much printed matter.

Eve Tavor Bannet, University of Oklahoma

Eve Tavor Bannet is the George Lynn Cross Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Oklahoma. Her publications include: The Domestic Revolution (2000); Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence 1688–1820 (Cambridge, 2005); Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading, 1720–1810 (Cambridge, 2011); and with Susan Manning, (ed.) Transatlantic Literary Studies, 1660–1830 (Cambridge, 2012). Professor Bannet also edited British and American Letter Manuals 1680–1810 4 volumes (2008), and Emma Corbett (2011) and is currently Editor of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture.