Overview

The Double Life of Books confronts a central challenge for the history of reading: how to investigate and then describe the elusive process of what the leading book historian Robert Darnton calls 'inner appropriation.' It does so by bringing two voices together for the first time: the so-called 'ordinary reader' who began life as a devotee of Dr Seuss's The Cat in the Hat and the literature professor who writes about the history of media and reading. Ranging across world literatures in English since the 1890s and drawing on the latest research into the neuroscience of the reading brain, The Double Life of Books is at once an exercise in materialist autobibliobiography, asking what it means to be a living reader in our multimedia age, and a sustained reflection on academic professionalization, raising new questions about the limits of disciplinarity and critique.

Full Product Details

Author:   Peter D McDonald (Professor of English and Related Literature, University of Oxford, St Hugh’s College)
Publisher:   Edinburgh University Press
Imprint:   Edinburgh University Press
ISBN:  

9781399524414

ISBN 10:   1399524410
Pages:   264
Publication Date:   31 January 2026
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available  
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Table of Contents

Preface: Two Voices Acknowledgements Figures First Voice 1. ‘The History of Sex’: orality, literacy, and the living brain 2. ‘The Lure of Literature’: books, histories, and the state 3. ‘Scant Cream’: sense, nonsense, and the reader re-made 4. My Finnegans Wake: Like HCE, Rhodes Must Fall Second Voice Part I: Extra-disciplinary: Questions of Method 1. Getting over discipline envy 2. Ideas of the book and experiences of literature: after Theory? 3. Reclaiming the Future of Book History from an African Perspective 4. Elton John, libel, and the perils of close reading 5. The Worldliness of Books Part II: Reading Envelopes: Four examples 6. Re-publishing Yeats’s ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ in the 1890s 7. Re-reading Pound’s ‘In a station of the metro’ 8. Calder’s Beckett 9. Once upon a time in a bookshop: The Satanic Verses revisited Bibliography Index

Reviews

McDonald takes us on one engrossing and eye-opening trip after another into the multi-layered domain of the written word - writing as profession, as practice, as industry, as trade.--J. M. Coetzee, Nobel laureate 2003 A wonderfully creative book. The most engagingly written, extensively researched, and illuminating account that I have seen of what it means to read in an informed way.--David Attwell, University of York

Author Information

Peter D. McDonald is Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Hugh’s College. He writes on literature, the modern state and free expression; the history of writing systems, cultural institutions and publishing; multilingualism, translation and interculturality; and on the promise of creative criticism. His principal publications include British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880–1914 (1997); Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays by D F McKenzie, co-edited with Michael Suarez (2002); The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences (2009; see also theliteraturepolice.com), which was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Writing 2011; and Artefacts of Writing: Ideas of the State and Communities of Letters from Matthew Arnold to Xu Bing (2017; see also artefactsofwriting.com). He is also co-author of PEN International: An Illustrated History (2021), which was Motovun Book of the Year for 2021.

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