I'm happy to announce that the collection of papers that I've been editing with my colleagues Kjell-Ivar Skerdingstad, Lynne McKechnie and Knut Oterholm will be forthcoming in late spring/early summer 2016 (fingers crossed!).
The collection, "Plotting the Reading Experience: Theory/Practice/Politics" will be published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press, and features 23 papers that address different aspects of the reading experience.
We can't thank enough the researchers who generously contributed their work for this collection -- for their expertise and their patience. Here's a table of contents (links coming soon):
Chapter 1: Introduction: Plotting the Reading Experience
Chapter 2: The Hidden Foundations of Critical Reading, Magnus Persson
Chapter 3: What is a Reading Experience? The Development of a Theoretical and Empirical Understanding, Gitte Balling
Chapter 4: Re-Imagining Reading, Gabrielle Cliff Hodges
Chapter 5: Evidence of Reading? The Swedish Public’s Letters to Selma Lagerlöf: Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches to the History of Reading, Jenny Bergenmar and Maria Karlsson
Chapter 6: Byatt versus Bloom: or, Reading by Patricide versus Reading by Love, Marianne Børch
Chapter 7: A Cognitive Poetic Approach to Researching the Reading Experience, Sara Whiteley
Chapter 8: Tempering Ambiguity – The Quality of the Reading Experience, Kjell Ivar Skjerdingstad and Knut Oterholm
Chapter 9: Fun…and Other Reasons for Sharing Reading with Strangers: Mass Reading Events and the Possibilities of Pleasure, Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg Sedo
Chapter 10: The Once and Future Self: (Re)reading Personal Lists, Notes, and Calendars, Pamela McKenzie and Elisabeth Davies
Chapter 11: More Benefit from a Well-Stocked Library than a Well-Stocked Pharmacy: How Do Readers Use Books as Therapy? Liz Brewster
Chapter 12: Literary Reading as a Social Technology: An Exploratory Study on Shared Reading Groups, Mette Steenberg
Chapter 13: The Indescribable Described: Readers’ Experiences when Reading About Tragic Loss, Eva Maria Koopman
Chapter 14: When Comics Set the Pace: The Experience of Time and the Reading Comics, Lucia Cedeira Serantes
Chapter 15: Reading Groups in Swedish Public Libraries, Kerstin Rydbeck
Chapter 16: “I readed it!” (Marissa, 4 years): The Experience of Reading from the Perspective of Young Children Themselves: A Cautionary Tale, Lynne (E.F.) McKechnie
Chapter 17: Reading the Readers: Tracking Visible Online Reading Audiences, Marianne Martens
Chapter 18: Literature in Common: Reading for Pleasure in School Reading Groups, Teresa Cremin and Joan Swann
Chapter 19: Desire and Becoming – Multilingual Pupils’ Reading Experiences, Joron Pihl and Kristin Skinstad van der Kooij
Chapter 20: Experiencing the Social Melodrama in the 21th Century: Approaches of Amateur and Professional Criticism, Cecilie Naper
Chapter 21: The Republic of Readers: Book Clubs in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, 1815-1830, Arnold Lubbers
Chapter 22: “Crazy Thirst for Knowledge”: Chinese Readers and the 1980s “Book Series Fever", Shih-Wen Sue Chen
Chapter 23: Enabling Testimonies and Producing Witnesses: Exploring Readers’ Responses to Two Norwegian Post-Terror Blogs, Tonje Vold