Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century

Reviews / Votes

What makes Lupton's thoughtful and learned new book, Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century, so interesting... is that she presents a set of exemplary readers and writers whose reflective encounters with books highlight the utility of the codex as a technique for thinking about time in its many meanings. The result is a vigorous and partially novel defense of the value of books and the humanities to a happy and meaningful life... Rather than seeing time as a scarce, homogeneous resource to be economized or optimized, Lupton invites us to follow her in seeing books as things that introduce difference, discontinuity, and even plasticity into time itself.
-David Henkin, Public Books The big achievement here is to set the book in motion, wrenching it free of its disciplinary moorings and putting it back into the flux and flow of time. Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century is a slim book, but dense, pointing forward itself to future possibilities and new angles on the history of reading.
-Gill Partington, Cambridge University, LA Review of Books Memoir-like elements give Lupton's book a vivid immediacy rarely achieved in scholarly writing . . . she shows us how reading feels, in both its social and its most deeply personal aspects . . . Her book goes beyond the perennial problem of how, amid life's many distractions, we might carve out time to read. Reading itself, she argues, "makes" time: books allow us to apprehend time as something elusive and elastic, less a resource to be exploited than an experience to be explored.
-David Winters, Times Literary Supplement The excitement of acquiring concrete, pocketable books in the hope of perhaps someday reading their contents forms in the mind a modest but palpable self who may be permitted by circumstance to do so-a self still waiting in the wings. For them Reading and the Making of Time is written.
-Nan Z. Da, University of Notre Dame, The Hedgehog Review Christina Lupton's Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century is a fascinating exploration of how books-even those we don't get around to reading-shape our experience of time . . . Lupton's elegant prose render her complex ideas remarkably accessible . . . the book is ideally suited to course syllabi at the graduate and advanced undergraduate levels. Making of Time is certain to leave an impact on eighteenth-century studies, book history, and theories of reading. Moreover, its fresh perspective on the utility of activities generally deemed non-useful make it broadly applicable to other kinds of media studies including film and gaming.
-Matthew Risling, University of Michigan - Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute, Review of English Studies That Christina Lupton's Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century is best read slowly and carefully testifies to its achievement as both a rigorously researched history and a philosophy of reading for the present . . . For anyone invested in reading books, teaching books, or simply making time for books, Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century is just such a worthwhile commitment.
-Alexander Creighton, Harvard University, Studies in Romanticism