• Introduction


• 1: No Defence against the Words: A Story of Sonnet 29


• 2: The Schoolteacher


• 3: The Woman Who Pointed


• 4: The Woman Who Became a Poem


• 5: The Brain of Frances


• 6: The Doctor


• 7: Experiments with Renaissance Scripts


• 8: About Time: Three Little Poems


• 9: The Novel Experimenter


• 10: The Anthologist


• 11: The Novelist


• Afterword

Philip Davis is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. Reading for Life is an account of the work done by his research unit, the Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society (CRILS) in partnership with outreach charity The Reader since 2008. He is author of works on Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, George Eliot, Bernard Malamud, and on the uses of memory from Wordsworth to Lawrence, and has written various books on literary reading. He is editor of OUP's series The Literary Agenda on the role of literature in the world of the twenty-first century and a new series entitled My Reading.

This volume presents original case-histories of readers to delve into just what reading is and how it works.
Each chapter begins with a poem or excerpt which becomes the scene either of a reading-group transcription or of a thought-piece from an interviewed reader to explore therapeutic reading and how culture might impact upon health.