“The great fiction bore”: free libraries and the construction of a reading public in England, 1880-1914
“The great fiction bore”: free libraries and the construction of a reading public in England, 1880-1914
The Public Libraries Act (England and Wales) was passed in 1850 at a time when democracy was being hotly debated but only one person in forty was eligible to vote, and compulsory elementary education for all was still twenty years in the future. This essay explores how the public library came to act as a legitimating body for the performance of class and gender through reading practices. It argues that the social and political history surrounding the library movement in England is crucial to an understanding of how, though founded on the Arnoldian principle of culture as social panacea, it had come by the First World War to function on the principle of cultural capital as social signifier.
83-108
Hammond, Mary
36bc55ac-8543-411f-ba89-668e19905e35
2002
Hammond, Mary
36bc55ac-8543-411f-ba89-668e19905e35
Hammond, Mary
(2002)
“The great fiction bore”: free libraries and the construction of a reading public in England, 1880-1914.
Libraries & Culture, 37 (2), .
Abstract
The Public Libraries Act (England and Wales) was passed in 1850 at a time when democracy was being hotly debated but only one person in forty was eligible to vote, and compulsory elementary education for all was still twenty years in the future. This essay explores how the public library came to act as a legitimating body for the performance of class and gender through reading practices. It argues that the social and political history surrounding the library movement in England is crucial to an understanding of how, though founded on the Arnoldian principle of culture as social panacea, it had come by the First World War to function on the principle of cultural capital as social signifier.
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Published date: 2002
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Local EPrints ID: 63889
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/63889
ISSN: 1932-4855
PURE UUID: 9e424349-bd61-445b-ad1e-24097b9aa08c
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Date deposited: 14 Nov 2008
Last modified: 22 Jul 2022 21:19
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