Wegweisungen zum Lesen in England (1900 – 1945)

The widespread digital euphoria and the concomitant transformation of traditional ways of communication in our time, in particular the weakening of habits of reading by the achievements of digital competence, have put in the shade the age-old tradition of writing essays and of delivering public lectures on the pleasures and benefits of reading, practices that have been inscribed in this cultural tradition for centuries.
After some brief references to respective essays from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the Victorian Age, the present article focuses on the views and experiences of reading by some thirteen authors, among others by John M. Robertson, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Virginia Woolf, Hugh Walpole, Aldous Huxley, Walter de la Mare, with the aim of describing the richness and variety of their ideas about reading, as well as the emergence of specific problems (social advancement, memory, author-reader relation, life and literature) under the influence of changing social and cultural contexts during the first half of the twentieth century.
By and large, the guidance offered by elderly writers and readers to young people testifies to their trust in the universality and permanence of literary works that have stood the test of time. This classical stance, however, is broken up by an occasional “slumming expedition” and by a growing scepticism concerning the usefulness of reading lists, nourished by the recognition of the unavoidable subjectivity of the reading process and the active participation of the reader in the construction of meaning. At the same time the acceleration of modern life was felt to present a danger to the habit of reading, thus adumbrating present-day concerns. Owing to the crisis of culture after the Great War and during the 1930s, the essays reveal a nostalgic penchant for the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a surprising discovery of “a clearer perception” of life and “a superior reality” through literature.