Edinburgh History of Reading: Subversive Readers

Reveals the experience of reading in many cultures and across the ages

• Covers pornography and the origins of the transgender movement
• Explores everyday reading in Nazi Germany
• Analyses prison reading
• Examines reading in revolutionary societies and occupied nations

Subversive Readers explores the strategies used by readers to question authority, challenge convention, resist oppression, assert their independence and imagine a better world. This kind of insurgent reading may be found everywhere: in revolutionary France and Nazi Germany, in Eastern Europe under Communism and in Australian and Iranian prisons, among eighteenth-century women reading history and nineteenth-century men reading erotica, among postcolonial Africans, the blind, and pioneering transgender activists.