The double life of books : making and re-making the reader / Peter D. McDonald.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McDonald, Peter D., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Books and reading.

Academic writing.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xvi, 248 pages) : illustrations (black and white), digital, PDF file(s)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 2024.

Summary:

Reflects on reading as a lived experience and a scholarly field by bringing together two modes of writing, the academic and the autobiographical.

Contents:

Intro

List of Figures

Preface: Two Voices

Acknowledgements

Part I: First Voice

1. 'The History of Sex': Orality, Literacy and the Living Brain

2. 'The Lure of Literature': Books, Histories and the State

3. 'Scant Cream': Sense, Nonsense and the Reader Remade

4. My Finnegans Wake: Like HCE, Rhodes Must Fall

Part II: Second Voice

Extra-Disciplinary: Questions of Method

5. Getting over Discipline Envy

6. Ideas of the Book and Experiences of Literature: After Theory?

7. Reclaiming the Future of Book History from an African Perspective

8. Elton John, Libel and the Perils of Close Reading

9. The Worldliness of Books

Reading Envelopes: Four Examples

10. Republishing Yeats's 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' in the 1890s

11. Rereading Pound's 'In a Station of the Metro'

12. Calder's Beckett

13. Once upon a Time in a Bookshop: The Satanic Verses Revisited

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (viewed on March 31, 2026).

ISBN:

9781399524421