In Burning the Page, digital pioneer Jason Merkoski charts the ebook revolution's striking impact on the ways in which we create, discover, and share ideas. From the sleek halls of Silicon Valley to the jungles of Southeast Asia, Merkoski explores how ebooks came to be and predi…
"An exhilarating volume that will ratchet up the joy for all reading groups "Wendy Lesser's extraordinary alertness, intelligence, and curiosity have made her one of America's most significant cultural critics," writes Stephen Greenblatt. In Why I Read, Lesser draws on a lifetim…
In this important and innovative study Jon Klancher shows how the Romantic age produced a new discourse of the "Arts and Sciences" by reconfiguring the Enlightenment's idea of knowledge and by creating new kinds of cultural institutions with unprecedented public impact. He inves…
"Not only does the library have a long and complex history and politics, but it has an ambivalent presence in Western culture-- both a site of positive knowledge and a site of error, confusion, and loss. Nevertheless, in literary studies and in the humanities, including book his…
"The Risk of Reading is a defense of the idea that deep and close readings of literature can help us to understand ourselves and the world around us. It explores some of the meaning and implications of modern life through the deep reading of significant books. Waxler argues that…
An original exploration of some of the formative influences in Hitler's life--the books he most revered, and how they shaped the man and his thinking. Hitler's education and worldview were formed largely from the books in his private library. Recently, hundreds of those books we…
Reading and the Reader defends the value of reading serious literature, investigating the role of the reader in the human search for meaning outside as well as inside of books.
Galileo (1564-1642) incorporated throughout his work the language of battle, the rhetoric of the epic, and the structure of romance as a means to elicit emotional responses from his readers against his opponents. By turning to the literary as a field for creating knowledge, Gali…
In this engaging life of the twentieth century's most self-consciously learned dictator, Geoffrey Roberts explores the books Stalin read, how he read them, and what they taught him. Stalin firmly believed in the transformative potential of words and his voracious appetite for re…
How do readers experience literary narrative? Drawing on narrative theory, cognitive science, and the philosophy of mind, this book offers a principled account of the dynamics underlying readers' responses to narrative. Through its interdisciplinary approach, this study combines…
"This is an exciting period for the book, a time of innovation, experimentation, and change. It is also a time of considerable fear within the book industry as it adjusts to changes in how books are created and consumed. The movement to digital has been taking place for some tim…