Simon Frost

Allergic contact dermatitis from octylisothiazolinone

Octylisothiazolinone is a biocide that has been reported as a moderate, but rare contact allergen.

Readers and Retailed Literature: Findings from a UK public high street survey of purchasers’ expectations from books

Critical literature studies tend not to think about readers as customers and consumers or, in economic terms, end-users. From the Frankfurt School to World Literature, those critical studies have little to say about fiction from the viewpoint of readers as commercial actors aware of their participation in and construction of the market. But book retail, both online and off, remains the frame in which book-purchasing choices are made. To understand the hopes and desires of readers, would it not make sense to ask them? Using the high street bookshop as a metonymic site for reading within commodity culture, this article will present findings from a national survey with a corpus of 530 responses about expectations from purchased books. To ask what is expected from a book just purchased is simple, banal even, but collectively the answers to this question may provide the first tentative steps towards a political theory of reading, not from without, but from within our dominant economic frame.

Public Gains and Literary Goods

Atop the pyramid of nineteenth-century literary achievement are rarities such as Joseph Conrad; at some (considerable) distance below, is Rudyard Kipling, whose texts, despite their significant critical presence in the first third of the twentieth century, were later found to be brimming with the colonialism that Conrad found problematic and criticism found unacceptable. However, prior to this historiographic assessment, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, both Kipling and Conrad operated within a market that was more or less undifferentiated because it was saturated by colonialism. At one point they were evenly matched, since qualities other than colonial criticism were the primary goods offered by their publishers in the task of capturing market share. Readers eagerly read Conrad and Kipling alongside a host of other works, many by authors now forgotten but who were once household names. The qualities that those writers of the early twentieth-century popular market shared differed from the qualities valorized by later literary historiography.

Commodity Readers: An Introduction to a Frame for Reading

In the history of human conduct, the studied readings of national philology form only a fragment, for reading does not always comprise literary critical interpretation and aesthetic judgement. In the custody of other habits, other types of reading are clearly possible. So what kinds of other readings have occurred? Empirical studies have begun investigating reading evidence, gathered in searchable databases, but they remain largely evidential fragments and for the most part remain mute on the performance of ‘a reading’. To conduct a reading of a work, no matter how alternative, might risk sending the empiricist back into the domain of criticism, thus staking out the ‘reading’ as the fault line that separates histories of the book from comparative literary study.