The Pleasures of Memory

Learning to Read with Charles Dickens

Fiction & Literature, Literary Theory & Criticism, British, Books & Reading
Cover of the book The Pleasures of Memory by Sarah Winter, Fordham University Press
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Author: Sarah Winter ISBN: 9780823266180
Publisher: Fordham University Press Publication: August 3, 2015
Imprint: Fordham University Press Language: English
Author: Sarah Winter
ISBN: 9780823266180
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Publication: August 3, 2015
Imprint: Fordham University Press
Language: English

How did this nineteenth-century novelist change the way we think? “A fine contribution to the sociology of literature . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice

What are the sources of the commonly held presumption that reading literature should make people more just, humane, and sophisticated? Looking at literary history in relation 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.”

Sarah 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.

View on Amazon View on AbeBooks View on Kobo View on B.Depository View on eBay View on Walmart

How did this nineteenth-century novelist change the way we think? “A fine contribution to the sociology of literature . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice

What are the sources of the commonly held presumption that reading literature should make people more just, humane, and sophisticated? Looking at literary history in relation 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.”

Sarah 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.

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