1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910788460403321

Autore

Winter Sarah

Titolo

The pleasures of memory [[electronic resource] ] : learning to read with Charles Dickens / / Sarah Winter

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York, : Fordham University Press, 2011

ISBN

0-8232-6618-4

0-8232-6619-2

0-8232-4113-0

0-8232-4885-2

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (471 p.)

Disciplina

823/.8

Soggetti

Collective memory and literature

Books and reading - Psychological aspects

Books and reading - History - 19th century

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Dickens and the pleasures of memory -- Memory's bonds: associationism and the freedom of thought -- Dickens's originality: serial fiction, celebrity, and The Pickwick Papers -- The pleasures of memory, part I: curiosity as didacticism in The Old Curiosity Shop -- The pleasures of memory, part II: epitaphic reading and cultural memory -- Learning by heart in Our Mutual Friend -- Dickens's laughter: school reading and democratic literature, 1870-1940.

Sommario/riassunto

What are the sources of the commonly held presumption that reading literature should make people more just, humane, and sophisticated? Rendering literary history responsive to the cultural histories of reading, publishing, and education, The Pleasures of Memory illuminates the ways in which Dickens’s serial fiction shaped not only the popular practice of reading for pleasure and instruction but also the school subject we now know as “English.”Winter shows how Dickens’s serial fiction instigated specific reading practices by reworking the conventions of religious didactic tracts from which most Victorians learned to read. Incorporating an influential associationist psychology of learning founded on the cumulative functioning of memory, Dickens’



s serial novels consistently led readers to reflect on their reading as a form of shared experience.Dickens’s celebrity authorship, Winter argues, represented both a successful marketing program for popular fiction and a cultural politics addressed to a politically unaffiliated, social-activist Victorian readership. As late-nineteenth century educational reforms consolidated British and American readers into “mass” populations served by state school systems, Dickens’s beloved novels came to embody the socially inclusive and humanizing goals of democratic education.