Reading Lesson

<p>[Brantlinger's] writing is admirably lucid his knowledge impressive and his thesis a welcome reminder of the class bias that so often accompanies denunciations of popular fiction. --Publishers Weekly<br /><br />Brantlinger is adept at discussing both the fiction itself and the social environment in which that fiction was produced and disseminated. He brings to his study a thorough knowledge of traditional and contemporary scholarship which results in an important scholarly book on Victorian fiction and its production. --Choice<br /><br />Timely scrupulously researched thoroughly enlightening and steadily readable. . . . A work of agenda-setting historical scholarship. --Garrett Stewart<br /><br />Fear of mass literacy stalks the pages of Patrick Brantlinger's latest book. Its central plot involves the many ways in which novels and novel reading were viewed--especially by novelists themselves--as both causes and symptoms of rotting minds and moral decay among nineteenth-century readers.</p>