The Pleasures of Memory by Sarah Winter - 9780823233526

The Pleasures of MemoryLearning to Read with Charles Dickens\nAuthor(s): Sarah Winter\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Fordham University Press, United States\nImprint: Fordham University Press\nISBN-13: 9780823233526, 978-0823233526\nSynopsis\nWhat are the sources of the commonly held presumption that reading literature should make people more just, humane, and sophisticated? Rendering literary history responsive to the cultural histories of reading, publishing, and education, The Pleasures of Memory illuminates the ways in which Dickens's serial fiction shaped not only the popular practice of reading for pleasure and instruction but also the school subject we now know as \""English.\""\n Winter shows how Dickens's serial fiction instigated specific reading practices by reworking the conventions of religious didactic tracts from which most Victorians learned to read. Incorporating an influential associationist psychology of learning founded on the cumulative functioning of memory, Dicken.