The Double Life of Books: Making and Re-Making the Reader

The Double Life of Books confronts a central challenge for the history of reading: how to investigate and then describe the elusive process of what the leading book historian Robert Darnton calls ’inner appropriation.’ It does so by bringing two voices together for the first time: the so-called ’ordinary reader’ who began life as a devotee of Dr Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat and the literature professor who writes about the history of media and reading. Ranging across world literatures in English since the 1890s and drawing on the latest research into the neuroscience of the reading brain, The Double Life of Books is at once an exercise in materialist autobibliobiography, asking what it means to be a living reader in our multimedia age, and a sustained reflection on academic professionalization, raising new questions about the limits of disciplinarity and critique.

Peter D. McDonald is Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Hugh’s College. He writes on literature, the modern state and free expression; the history of writing systems, cultural institutions and publishing; multilingualism, translation and interculturality; and on the promise of creative criticism. His principal publications include British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880-1914 (1997); Making Meaning: ’Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays by D F McKenzie, co-edited with Michael Suarez (2002); The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences (2009; see also theliteraturepolice.com), which was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Writing 2011; and Artefacts of Writing: Ideas of the State and Communities of Letters from Matthew Arnold to Xu Bing (2017; see also artefactsofwriting.com). He is also co-author of PEN International: An Illustrated History (2021), which was Motovun Book of the Year for 2021.