Book, Reading and Its Audience In the Contemporary World: Cult History essay[LS]

Language: Brazilian Portuguese. This book covers reading and its audience from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries and testifies to the development of cultural history in the last ten years.. Focusing on the expansion of printed matter culture in Europe after 1760, it follows the twists and turns and developments that marked the transition from an activity reserved for a few, for the elite by birth or wealth, to a leisure activity shared by a much larger number of readers.. In this slow emergence of a mass culture, around 1880 in Great Britain and France, a little or much later in neighboring countries, many of the transformations of the world in which we live are sheltered.. The school and industrial revolutions played their role in this change in society, as did the emergence of modern media.. The newspaper, the serial novel, the school manual, the dictionary, the knowledge dissemination book, all of these served to make more and more people read, resulting in this mass culture that is so talked about today.. Probably originating in Europe rather than the United States, before the First World War, more than after the Second, it concerned the mass of readers of serial literature – detective or sentimental – even before the appearance of television or the development of mass-market cinema.