Introduction María Angélica Thumala Olave
Part I. The project of a cultural sociology of reading
Chapter 1. “Reading matters. A cultural sociology of reading” María Angélica Thumala Olave
Part II. Reading, books and texts as iconic experience
Chapter 2. “The Felt Value of Reading Zines” Ash Watson and Andy Bennett
Chapter 3. “Between self and other: Anäis Nin’s transformative erotics” Jessica Widner
Chapter 4. “Knowing through Feeling: The Aesthetic Structure of a Novel and the Iconic Experience of Reading” Jan Vâna
Chapter 5. “Book love. A cultural sociological interpretation of the attachment to books” María Angélica Thumala Olave
Part III. Literary value, evaluation and cultural intermediaries
Chapter 6. “Spatial Reading: Evaluative Frameworks and the Making of Literary Authority” Günther Leypoldt
Chapter 7. “Readers and Reviewers: A Symbiotic Knot” Phillipa Chong
Chapter 8. “The Courage to Continue: Reading and Motivating Intellectual Labors at University Presses” Joshua Silver
Chapter 9. “Reviewing Strategies and the Normalization of Uncertain Texts” Álvaro Santana Acuña
Chapter 10. “Customer reviews of 'highbrow' literature: a comparative reception study of The Inheritance of Loss and The White Tiger” Daniel Allington
Part IV. Bookshops, sociability and the interplay of “high” and “consumer” culture
Chapter 11. “On the sociability of books for an ethics of modern individuality: Taking Georg Simmel to a provincial English independent bookshop” Daniel R. Smith
Chapter 12. “The Cultural Biography of the ‘Avant-Garde’: An Intellectual Bookstore and Post-Mao China’s High Culture Legacy” Eve Y. Lin
Part V. Reading the social and the aesthetic public sphere
Chapter 13. “The Politics of Happily-Ever-After: Romance Genre Fiction as Aesthetic Public Sphere” Anna Michelson
Chapter 14. “Reading Literature, Reading People, and Reading Risk during the Chinese Cultural Revolution” Eddy U
Chapter 15. “Living the Global Color Line: Book Interpretations in Kabul as Insights into Transnational Social Structures” Syeda Masood
Chapter 16. “From normative reading to interfaces of reading: The functions of reading in Chinese literature and society” Lena Henningsen.