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sawyerbell's review against another edition
5.0
As a bit of an autodidact myself, I found this book both fascinating and moving.
ianfjanssen's review against another edition
5.0
This. This is how to write history for an academic audience, although it would be a shame if that was the only audience it reached.
guojing's review against another edition
5.0
This has been an absolutely wonderful read. Each night I would read a section - ranging from 2 to 10 pages - to my mother, which allowed me to show off my familiarity with the topic by serving as a running commentary, explaining details on almost every page. That said, it is not a book for everyone: she has very little knowledge of either the period or the literature, so without my assistance this book would have been meaningless to her. However, having been a proud autodidact since childhood, this was for the most part a relatively easy read for me.
The primary argument of the author is that everybody is wrong when it comes to how they investigate how literature influences people. That is, they look at the literature and imagine how it must have influenced people, yet never actually ask the people how they themselves felt to have been influenced by it. So by studying surveys and autobiographies written by WEA members, Ruskin College attendees, and miscellaneous autodidacts ranging from the 1750s to the 1950s, Rose endeavours to provide the audience's side of the picture.
Yes, this book can be dull at times, overly repetitive, and sometimes negatively didactic, bit in general it is an excellent read. The middle sections deal a little too much with Marxism in working class thought (rather, what the working class interpreted as Marxism, for, apparently, nobody had ever actually managed to get through Marx), and the book as a whole could have dealt a lot more, to my liking, with the topic of the introduction: frames and individual interpretations and how people experience what they read, etc. But, as a whole, this is a remarkably enjoyable and elucidating book.
The primary argument of the author is that everybody is wrong when it comes to how they investigate how literature influences people. That is, they look at the literature and imagine how it must have influenced people, yet never actually ask the people how they themselves felt to have been influenced by it. So by studying surveys and autobiographies written by WEA members, Ruskin College attendees, and miscellaneous autodidacts ranging from the 1750s to the 1950s, Rose endeavours to provide the audience's side of the picture.
Yes, this book can be dull at times, overly repetitive, and sometimes negatively didactic, bit in general it is an excellent read. The middle sections deal a little too much with Marxism in working class thought (rather, what the working class interpreted as Marxism, for, apparently, nobody had ever actually managed to get through Marx), and the book as a whole could have dealt a lot more, to my liking, with the topic of the introduction: frames and individual interpretations and how people experience what they read, etc. But, as a whole, this is a remarkably enjoyable and elucidating book.
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