Reading, Wanting, and Broken Economics: A Twenty-First-Century Study of Readers and Bookshops in Southampton around 1900 eBook

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Uses a historical study of bookselling and readers as a way to question and rethink our understanding of the market for symbolic goods. Combining historical study, theorization, and experimental fiction, this book takes commodity culture and book retail around 1900 as the prime example of a market of symbolic goods. With the port of Southampton, England, as his case study, Simon R. Frost reveals how the city’s bookshops, with their combinations of libraries, haberdashery, stationery, and books, sustained and were sustained by the dreams of ordinary readers, and how together they created the values powering this market. The goods in this market were symbolic and were not “consumed” but read. Their readings were created between other readers and texts, in happy disobedience to the neoliberal laws of the free market. Today such reader-created social markets comprise much of the world’s branded economies, which is why Frost calls for a new understanding of both literary and market values.

This is a digital product.

Reading, Wanting, and Broken Economics: A Twenty-First-Century Study of Readers and Bookshops in Southampton around 1900 is written by Simon R. Frost and published by Suny Press. The Digital and eTextbook ISBNs for Reading, Wanting, and Broken Economics are 9781438483535, 1438483538 and the print ISBNs are 9781438483511, 1438483511. Additional ISBNs for this eTextbook include 9781438483528.