Reveals the experience of reading in many cultures and across the ages Bringing together the latest scholarship from all over the world on topics ranging from reading practices in ancient China to the workings of the twenty-first-century reading brain, the 4 volumes of the Edinburgh History of Reading demonstrate that reading is a deeply imbricated, socio-political practice, at once personal and public, defiant and obedient. It is often materially ephemeral, but it can also be emotionally and intellectually enduring. Common Readers casts a fascinating light on the literary experiences of ordinary people: miners in Scotland, churchgoers in Victorian London, workers in Czarist Russia, schoolgirls in rural Australia, farmers in Republican China, and forward to today's online book discussion groups. Chapters in this volume explore what they read, and how books changed their lives. Jonathan Rose is William R. Kenan Professor of History at Drew University. Mary Hammond is Professor of English and Book History at the University of Southampton.

Jonathan Rose is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History at Drew University, USA. He is the author of Readers' Liberation (Oxford University Press, 2018), The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor (Yale University Press, 2014), which won the New Jersey Council for the Humanities Book Prize, and The Edwardian Temperament 1895-1919 (Ohio University Press, 1986). He is also the editor of The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation (University of Massachusetts Press, 2001) and co-editor of A Companion to the History of the Book (Blackwell, 2007) and British Literary Publishing Houses, 1820-1965 (Gale, 1991).