Fever Reading
ISBN: 9781611682441
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / University of New Hampshire Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Books and reading;

Drawing on a rich archive of scandal chronicles, pornography, medical journals, religious novels, and popular newspapers, as well as more canonical sources, Michael Millner examines the panics and paranoia associated with "bad reading" in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the Civil War. Weaving into his analysis a model of emotion recently developed in cognitive psychology, he provides the back-history to our present-day debates about "bad" reading and shows how these debates--both in the past and in the present--are in part about the shape of the public sphere itself.

MICHAEL MILLNER is an assistant professor of American studies and English at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

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