Further Reading Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature Series

What does reading mean in the twenty-first century? As other disciplines challenge literary criticism's authority to answer this question, English professors are defining new alternatives to close reading and to interpretation more generally. Further Reading brings together thirty essays drawing on approaches as different as formalism, historicism, neuroscience, disability, and computation. Contributors take up the following questions: What do we mean when we talk about 'reading' today? How are reading techniques evolving in the digital era? What is the future of reading? This book foregrounds reading as a topic worthy of investigation in its own right rather than as a sub-section of histories of the book, sociologies of literacy, or theories of literature. As our knowledge of reading changes in step with the media and the scholarly tools used to apprehend it, a more precise understanding of this topic is crucial to the discipline's future. This collection introduces new ways of conceptualizing the term's forms, boundaries, and uses. Its contributors bring varied vocabularies to bear on the contested nature and continued importance of reading, within the academy and beyond.

Matthew Rubery is Professor of Modern Literature at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of The Untold Story of the Talking Book (Harvard, 2016) and The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction after the Invention of the News (Oxford, 2009). He also co-curated 'How We Read: A Sensory History of Books for Blind People', a public exhibition held at the UK's first annual Being Human festival. Leah Price is Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University. Her books include What We Talk About When We Talk About Books (Basic, 2019),How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton, 2012) and The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (Cambridge, 2000). She has written on media old and new for the New York Times, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, San Francisco Chronicle, and Boston Globe.