Chapter 1 An Introduction to Reading Communities: Processes and Formations

Chapter 2 Reading in an Epistolary Community in Eighteenth-Century England

Chapter 3 Nineteenth-Century Reading Groups in Britain and the Community of the Text: an Experiment with Little Dorrit

Chapter 4 Reading Across the Empire: the National Home Reading Union Abroad

Chapter 5 Utopian Civic-Mindedness: Robert Maynard Hutchins, Mortimer Adler, and the Great Books Enterprise

Chapter 6 ‘I Used to Read Anything that Caught My Eye, But …’: Cultural Authority and Intermediaries in a Virtual Young Adult Book Club

Chapter 7 The Growth of Reading Groups as a Feminine Leisure Pursuit: Cultural Democracy or Dumbing Down?

Chapter 8 Speaking Subjects: Developing Identities in Women’s Reading Communities

Chapter 9 Leading Questions: Interpretative Guidelines in Contemporary Popular Reading Culture

Chapter 10 Marionettes and Puppeteers? The Relationship between Book Club Readers and Publishers