TEXT PRINT CULTURE丨Book Design for the “Cultivated Eye”

This lecture will be co-hosted by the Literature Team of the School of Foreign Studies and the SUFE Centre for the Study of Text and Print Culture

 讲座信息 / Information 

Time: 2 November, 2021, 15:00-17:00

Format: Zoom meeting

Zoom ID: 868 423 06542

Zoom PW: 694894

 讲座摘要 / Abstract 

While reading is generally regarded as beneficial, it is also the subject of cultural concerns about harmful effects it can potentially induce in the reader and wider social problems that might arise as a result. Today, a major concern is how digital reading “rewires” our brains; in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the question was whether the material form of books negatively affected children’s eyesight and cognition. A discourse of “reading hygiene” developed as medical knowledge was explicitly linked to the design of books and debated in print by doctors and professions that intersected with children’s book production: printing, publishing, and education. As a starting point for exploring the relationship between material form, cognition, and the social effects of reading, in this paper I examine this debate through three foci: a corpus of school hygiene manuals published between 1873 and 1919; the British Association for the Advancement of Science’s landmark Report on the Influence of School-Books upon Eyesight (1912/13); and a letter to the editor of the printing trade periodical, The Imprint, from Thomas Nelson’s chief educational editor, as an example of the publishing trade’s understanding of printing as an art relevant for the modern age.  

 主讲人简介 / Biography 

Anne Marie Hagen (PhD, University of Edinburgh) is Associate Professor of English at the Norwegian Defence University College (Oslo, Norway). She specialises in print culture and the history of reading and publishing from the nineteenth century to the present, with emphasis on books for children and military life-writing. A longstanding research interest is the interplay between discourses of medicine, aesthetics, and theories of reading in the early twentieth century. Her recent research has focused on life-writing in higher education (Scandinavian Journal of Military Studies, 2019) and the intersection of gender and heroism in juvenile life-writing. She is editor of Reading Mediation: Relationships, Intervention and Organization from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Lehigh University Press). 

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