Overview

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. Steel City Readers makes available, and interprets in detail, a large body of new evidence about past cultures and communities of reading. Its distinctive method is to listen to readers' own voices, rather than theorising about them as an undifferentiated group. Its cogent and engaging structure traces reading journeys from childhood into education and adulthood, and attends to settings from home to school to library. It has a distinctive focus on reading for pleasure and its framework of argument situates that type of reading in relation to dimensions of gender and class. It is grounded in place, and particularly in the context of a specific industrial city: Sheffield. The men and women featured in the book, coming to adulthood in the 1930s and 1940s, rarely regarded reading as a means of self-improvement. It was more usually a compulsive and intensely pleasurable private activity.

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9781802078589

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Reviews

'This is a fascinating and important study. It will be a rich and rare resource. Mary Grover has done a superb job illuminating the meaning of reading in individual lives as well as giving us insights into the local and national contexts.' - Alison Light, author of Common People: The History of an English Family

"\‘This is a fascinating and important study. It will be a rich and rare resource. Mary Grover has done a superb job illuminating the meaning of reading in individual lives as well as giving us insights into the local and national contexts.\’ - Alison Light, author of Common People: The History of an English Family   ‘Steel City Readers provides an excellent opportunity to appreciate the power of reading and the changes reading for pleasure brings to a community and its literary legacies.’ - The Sheffield Telegraph 'Utilising oral testimony, (Steel City Readers) has produced a much-needed account of everyday reading cultures in a period of momentous social and cultural change. (...) Steel City Readers is an engaging history of reading cultures, and its findings can be applied beyond the boundaries of Sheffield. For historians of popular culture and everyday life, it raises important questions about the value of reading in varied socio-economic contexts and – critically – disengages the study of reading cultures from debates about ""high"" and ""low"" brow culture.' Sarah Kenny, Northern History"

\‘This is a fascinating and important study. It will be a rich and rare resource. Mary Grover has done a superb job illuminating the meaning of reading in individual lives as well as giving us insights into the local and national contexts.\’ - Alison Light, author of Common People: The History of an English Family   ‘Steel City Readers provides an excellent opportunity to appreciate the power of reading and the changes reading for pleasure brings to a community and its literary legacies.’ - The Sheffield Telegraph 'Utilising oral testimony, (Steel City Readers) has produced a much-needed account of everyday reading cultures in a period of momentous social and cultural change. (...) Steel City Readers is an engaging history of reading cultures, and its findings can be applied beyond the boundaries of Sheffield. For historians of popular culture and everyday life, it raises important questions about the value of reading in varied socio-economic contexts and – critically – disengages the study of reading cultures from debates about ""high"" and ""low"" brow culture.' Sarah Kenny, Northern History ‘Steel City Readers is an engaging history of reading cultures, and its findings can be applied beyond the boundaries of Sheffield. For historians of popular culture and everyday life, it raises important questions about the value of reading in varied socio-economic contexts and—critically—disengages the study of reading cultures’ Sarah Kenny, Northern History

'This is a fascinating and important study. It will be a rich and rare resource. Mary Grover has done a superb job illuminating the meaning of reading in individual lives as well as giving us insights into the local and national contexts.' - Alison Light, author of Common People: The History of an English Family  

Author Information

Mary Grover, formerly a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at Sheffield University, is the founder of the community history group Reading Sheffield.

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