The KwaZulu-Natal Provincial Library Services (KZNPLS) is attempting to address the reading needs of black adult users neglected during the apartheid era. The provision of popular adult English fiction, which consumes a considerable portion of the KZNPLS book budget, has catered for the recreational reading tastes of a small, educated, predominantly white group. This study explores whether popular adult English fiction has a role to play in the reading needs of black adult users in libraries affiliated to KZNPLS. An exploratory survey using the semi-structured interview was conducted in black libraries affiliated to KZNPLS to investigate whether there was an interest in popular English fiction and whether it was assisting readers to develop English language reading skills. The findings of the survey suggested that needs were very broad. However, basic literacy material was the most needed, and popular English fiction was playing a significant role in improving English language reading skills and fluency. The study suggests that if transformation and development is to take place in South Africa, the country's inhabitants must cultivate the critical thinking skills necessary for full utilisation of information technology. The oral tradition is not sufficient for South Africa's information needs but should be incorporated into a synergic union with global information systems. Reading has an established role to play in the development of critical thinking skills but South Africa lacks a strong reading culture. The fostering of English-language reading ability is appropriate as English is the lingua franca of South Africa and the foremost language of technology. The structure of much popular English fiction has transcultural appeal due to its use of archetypal formulas. Popular English fiction provides reading motivation but has a controversial history due to elitist condemnations of its literary quality. To overcome the debate of whether libraries should prefer literary merit or popularity in their fiction collections, it is recommended that diversity be the touchstone and that readers be given full opportunity to indulge in the free voluntary reading that provides fertile ground for the cultivation of critical thinking skills. / Thesis (M.I.S.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1997.

Introduction: Alice in Wonderland is perhaps the most renowned fantasy book for children. Over and above this though, it has relevance for adults. People too often dismiss it as purely escapist reading, a means to escape from the monotony of everyday realism by delving into the realms of fantasy. Many critics propose that it operates on more than one level and I would have to agree - it is a pioneer of children's literature as well as a product and critique of the Victorian age. It is a story that has captured the world's imagination, with vivid characters and exciting adventures. The sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, although not as well known, equally offers an insight into the late nineteenth-century. I intend to explore the many layers found in these stories, and hope to expose them as being more than mere narratives, but as pieces of literature that thrive because they are so cleverly constructed Perhaps also their success lies in that they deal with the universal theme (for children and adults alike) of making sense of the seemingly nonsensical aspects of life and society. The stories, as well as the strange characters and happenings, are reminiscent of the Absurdist genre in drama, in which the objective is to turn the world upside down, so to speak, in order to understand people and society. My dissertation will begin by exploring the literary trends of children's books prior to 1865, in other words, before Alice in Wonderland was published. I intend to present an overview of Victorian and pre-Victorian children's fiction, tracing the development of the story for teaching and religious instruction, up until the time when the story was liberated to be simply the vehicle for pleasurable recreational purposes. Thus my opening chapter is an exploration of the didactic children's literature that dominated the early nineteenth century, examining the educationalists that helped expand the genre of children's literature. Next, I will include a brief biography of Lewis Carroll. It is important to my overall theme in that a biography sums up, in one human centre, the forces at play in Victorian sensibility. As a modern audience, we seem to seize upon the idea of his 'character', desperately attempting to understand what motivated him to write such tour de force stories. The interest for me at this point is to examine how academics have portrayed Carroll's 'character'. The motive behind this section is to beg the question of whether his complex personality affects our reading of the texts, or whether they can be seen as entirely separate from a life to which some scandal has been attributed. In the remainder of my dissertation, I shall focus on how the texts are a reflection of a typical Victorian child's experiences, and discuss how Alice 'grows' as a character, and what she reveals about her society in the process of discovering how she should define herself. Alice is the vehicle for Carroll's subversive commentary about his society, and her experiences in Wonderland and Looking-Glass land are often rooted in the undermining of conventional behaviour and traditions. Lastly, I will examine Carroll's stylistic organization of the narratives, paying particular attention to his treatment of time, dreams and language in the texts. I will discuss what his intentions are in creating 'nonsense that makes sense', as well as what this 'nonsense' discloses about the society he lived in and the values he seems to object to. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2004.

Zugl.: Oldenburg, Universiẗat, Diss., 2007.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Glasgow, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references. Print version also available.

Thesis (doctoral)--Uppsala University, 1983. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 183-194) and index.

This thesis analyses a change in the ways people composed and engaged with texts during the Warring States (481-221 BCE) period in Early China. It examines changes in the textual sphere as a result of an emergent manuscript culture, that is to say, the increased spread and reliance on manuscript texts for the communication of ideas. This shift moved away from the predominantly oral, commemorative, and ritual use of text in earlier periods, and provided key elements that would function in the text based discourse of the early empires. It influenced the way text across a variety of genres of writing was used and understood, structured and composed, and how it was collected and combined to form new arguments. I focus on texts from the Documents ?, and Odes ? genres, in addition to philosophical texts dealing with the past, and collections of sayings and arguments dealing with questions from cosmological to ethical issues. These materials form the mainstay of Warring States intellectual discourse, and exemplify the following textual developments: 1) the rise of collecting materials into compilations; 2) the emergence of genre classification; 3) the development of new authorship functions, 3) an increase in textual structuring and the integration of lore about the past, 4) the development of commentarial traditions, 5) the emergence of an explicit, self-reflexive understanding of writing and transmission, 6) advances in material structuring of manuscript-texts that interrelate form and content. The analysis is based primarily on excavated materials not edited during the early empires, and engages with comparative and interdisciplinary theory. It argues against models solely based on transmitted sources, which explained Warring States developments as a response to socio-political contexts. Instead, it posits developments in the textual culture itself as a necessary condition to explain the changes in intellectual discourse of the period.

This study advances and adds detail to our history of the reading of verse in England c.1350-1500. Scholarship has established major twelfth- and thirteenth-century changes in reading, and linked these changes to manuscripts containing the modern Middle English verse canon. Historians of early modern reading have also argued for distinctive changes in their own period. But the examination of reading between these two clusters of change has been limited. This study therefore asks how later medieval Middle English verse was read. The surviving copies of The Prick of Conscience and Speculum Vitae, two hugely successful religious instructional poems, form the primary body of evidence. This body is augmented by reference to hundreds of other manuscripts containing Middle English verse. Together, these can reveal much about what was normal and abnormal in reading. They are also an important part of the context for the reading of more canonical Middle English verse. Manuscript studies often proceeds through case studies of individual books and unusual evidence such as marginalia. This thesis turns to codicology to understand more widespread evidence for reading, combining qualitative case studies with quantitative techniques borrowed and developed from continental scholarship. The first chapter examines evidence of provenance, revealing that both The Prick of Conscience and Speculum Vitae were read by an impressive range of people and remained current into the sixteenth century. The second chapter considers the navigational aids used in copies of both poems. Reading in this period has been characterised as 'discontinuous', but it could be discontinuous in diverse ways, and readers also read continuously. The third chapter is a large-scale study of books' size and shape, showing how these features can reveal books' reading histories, sometimes in counterintuitive ways. The fourth chapter contends that readers in this period attended closely to rhyme and probably read for balanced rhyme structures. The fifth chapter uncovers the ways in which these poems were rewritten for new readers and investigates the composition of the Southern Recension of The Prick of Conscience, arguing that this new text was partly a formalist intervention. The conclusion summarises the new 'baseline' history of the reading of Middle English verse which is offered here, and gestures towards implications for our reading of the Middle English poems which are canonical today.

This thesis constructs a history of reading for South Asia (1857-1914) through an examination of the eccentric relationships that marginal colonial agents and subjects - soldiers, peasants, office clerks and women - developed with everyday forms of writing. Drawing on the methodologies of the history of the book, and literary and cultural histories, it creates a counterpoint to the dominant view of imperial self-fashioning as built on reading intensively and at length. Instead, it contends that the formation of identities in colonial South Asia, whether compliant or dissenting, was predicated on superficial forms of textual engagement, leaving the documents of empire most likely misread, unread, or simply read in part. I illustrate this argument through four chapters, each of which brings together extensive archival material and nonliterary texts, as well as both canonical and little-known literary works. The first two discuss the circulation of unread texts in colonial institutions: the army and the government office. I study Garnet Wolseley's pioneering war manual, The Soldier's Pocket-book for Field Service, a book that soldiers refused to read. This is juxtaposed, in the second study, with an examination of the reception of the bureaucratic document in illiterate peasant communities, explored through the colonial archive and ethnographic novels. In the third and fourth chapters, I focus on texts consumed in part. I turn to the Bengali Hindu almanac, a form that made the transition from manuscript to print in this period, and examine how it trained its new-found readership of English-educated office clerks to oscillate smoothly between British-bureaucratic and local forms of time, as well as to read quickly and selectively. I end with a study of The Indian Ladies' Magazine, and suggest that the cosmopolitan form of the periodical and editorial practices of extracting and summarising gave women unprecedented access to a network of global print.

Following recent critical work on writers' representations of sociability in Romantic literature, this thesis examines in detail the textual strategies (such as allusion, acts of address, and the use of 'coterie' symbols or references) which writers used to seek to establish a friendly or sympathetic relationship with a particular reader or readers, or to create and define a sense of community identity between readers. The thesis focuses on specific relationships between pairs and groups of writers (who form one another's first readers), and examines 'sociable' genres like letters, manuscript albums, occasional poetry, and periodical essays in a diverse series of author case-studies (Anna Barbauld, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, John Keats and Leigh Hunt). Such genres, the thesis argues, show how manuscript and print culture could frequently overlap and intersect, meaning that writers confronted the demands of two co-existing audiences - one private and familiar, the other public and unknown - in the same work. Rather than arguing that writers used manuscript culture practices and produced 'coterie' works purely to avoid confronting their anxieties about publishing in the commercial sphere of print culture, the thesis suggests that in producing such 'coterie' works writers engaged with and reflected contemporary philosophical and political concerns about the relationship between the individual and wider communities. In these works, writers engaged with the legacy of eighteenth-century philosophical ideas about the role (and limitations) of the sympathetic imagination in maintaining social communities, and with interpretative theories about the best kind of reader. Furthermore, the thesis argues that reading literary texts in the specific, material context in which they are 'published' to particular readers, either in print, manuscript, or letters, is vital to understanding writer/reader relationships in the Romantic period. This approach reveals how within each publication space, individual texts could be placed (either by their writers, by editors, or by other readers) in meaningful relationships with other texts, absorbing or appropriating them into new interpretative contexts.

The study derives from a belief, based on many researchers' writings, that wide and frequent book-reading aids the development of knowledge, emotional maturity and human sympathy, which are all essential attributes in a fragmented culture such as South Africa's. It is not accepted that conventional secondary-school literature-teaching in this country promotes a lifelong reading habit among the majority of pupils and a plea is made for the recognition of Reading as a curricular entity in its own right. The study suggests that, owing to a paucity of local research in this field, South African teachers and educational authorities are severely disadvantaged. If they are unable to offer advice based on a proper study of their pupils as readers, they run the risk of guiding many pupils' reading along paths that cannot promise satisfaction and fulfilment. Such stultifying of reading habits would contradict the aims of the present National Core Syllabuses for English (First Language). The thesis sets little store by the investigation of specific bookchoices, pointing out that the validity of such incidental findings, if gleaned from a latitudinal survey, is questionable. Instead, using the findings of questionnaires administered to nearly 2 800 pupils and their teachers, the thesis investigates the relationships between voluntary leisure-time reading and such factors as age, gender, intelligence, academic achievement and standard of living. It also looks at the influences of parents, teachers, peers, contemporary literature-teaching practices, school and public libraries, and leisure- time pursuits other than reading. Many suggestions are offered for further research into finer aspects of those considerations. Many of the findings serve merely to corroborate research from abroad, particularly in respect of age, gender and intelligence. That is none the less alarming when a striking decline in reading is found to occur in the early years of the secondary school. A number of other interesting findings emerge. Standard of living is shown to be inversely correlated with amount of reading, and television-viewing is not found to displace reading. Nor are other leisure-time pursuits found to affect amount of reading: avid readers are by and large extremely active and committed pupils. Reading emerges from the study as providing its own peculiar satisfaction, as does each of the other leisure activities investigated. The challenge is to ensure that infrequent readers become aware of what reading has to offer, and strategies for attempting to achieve that are posited, particularly with regard to the roles of public and school libraries. The roles of teachers and parents are found to be crucial to the development of an appetite for books, and it is suggested that schools and parents liaise formally and closely in this matter. The study groups pupils by a number of personal variables, and investigates their reactions to common forms and genres as well as to certain specifics of style, thereby discussing the relationship between reading, social maturity and academic achievement It argues strongly for recognition of the fact that educating secondary-school pupils in the development of keen and sensitive lifelong reading habits is a process which cannot be systematically taught as a set of skills.