Reading groups and book clubs are an important contemporary cultural practice, providing a window on the everyday interpretation of literary texts. While reading is often considered a solitary process, reading groups constitute a form of social reading where interpretive activity is produced and displayed in discourse. This book investigates the language of reading group meetings from a number of complementary linguistic and interactional perspectives, addressing a range of literary, social and discursive phenomena.
Unlike traditional cognitive studies, the focus of this volume is on real readers engaging in a habitual reading activity. The authors observe texts that are the subjects of discussion, and various meta-texts that may be draw on by readers. As reading here is seen as a social activity, the volume explores the construction of particular reader identities across a range of reading contexts, at both individual and group level. It sheds new light on the rich and complex nature of this type of literary interpretation and social interaction around books, and will be of interest to scholars in literacy studies as well as stylistics, applied linguistics, digital technologies and educational research.
| Preface |
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vii | |
| Acknowledgements |
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ix | |
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1 Introduction: Reading Groups and the Study of Literary Reading |
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1 | (29) |
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2 Social Reading and the Cognitive Stylistics of Literary Texts |
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30 | (31) |
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3 Mimetic Reading and Reader Identities |
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61 | (30) |
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4 Co-Reading and the Contextualisation of Response |
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91 | (29) |
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5 Reading Groups and Institutional Discourse |
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120 | (29) |
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149 | (24) |
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7 Conclusion: Developing an Integrated Analysis of Reading Group Discourse |
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173 | (22) |
| Appendix: A Note on the Representation of Reading Group Discourse |
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195 | (2) |
| Index |
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197 | |
David Peplow is a Lecturer in English Language at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. His research interests include discourse analysis, stylistics, and health humanities.
Joan Swann is Emeritus Professor of English Language at the Open University, UK. She is a sociolinguist with a particular interest in the analysis of spoken interaction.
Paola Trimarco is an Associate Professor at University of Nizwa, in the Sultanate of Oman. Her specialties are digital communication, literary stylistics and sociolinguistics.
Sara Whiteley is a Lecturer in Language and Literature at The University of Sheffield, UK who specialises in cognitive stylistics and cognitive linguistic discourse analysis.
