Ian Gadd (Bath Spa University)
Jane Eyre famously opens with its heroine seeking refuge behind a window-curtain to escape her aunt and cousins, losing herself in the pages of Bewick’s History of British Birds, having the volume flung at her by her older male cousin, before being banished to the so-called ‘red room’. While Jane seeks to escape through the act of reading, she cannot escape the act of reading and its physical, temporal, material, social, and cultural situatedness.
The history of reading is a growing area of interest among scholars and this paper will draw on this scholarship to provide some historical examples of how ‘situation’ has always been a part of reading practice—whether it is the effect of a reader’s physical location, the ways in which authors and printers have used the materiality of the book to shape the reading experience, or books that exhibit their own geographical consciousness.
Ian Gadd is professor of English Literature at Bath Spa University. His research focuses on the history of the London and Oxford book trades in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries; he also has interests in textual editing and the digital remediation of printed texts. He is President of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP) and a General Editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift. He is also the Academic Director of the Global Academy of Liberal Arts (GALA), an international network of universities and colleges with an interest in the liberal arts.