This volume explores the history of reading in the British Isles during a period in which the printed word became all pervasive. From wealthy readers of 'amatory fiction', through to men and women reading surreptitiously at the Victorian railway bookstall, it argues that a variety of new reading communities emerged during this period.

Edited by Sandro Jung and Stephen Colclough, the 2015 number of the MHRA Yearbook of English Studies features contributions that investigate the materiality of texts, their advertising and marketing, as well as readerly engagements with different works that are, as part of their attempts at classification, conceived of as acts of canon formation. Extending from the late seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, the contributions revolve around questions related to the reading and interpretation of texts, the shaping of authorial reputations, and the role that booksellers and/or publishers...