Community Libraries: Connecting Readers in the Atlantic World, 1650-1850

该研究网络将调查现代黎明时期图书馆的文化史。近来对阅读史的兴趣高涨，为学者们开辟了许多新的解释途径。图书馆、读书俱乐部和阅读圈特别受到关注，因为学者们试图恢复阅读发生的物理、行政和文化环境。然而，这些研究往往局限于学科范围内，没有充分利用图书馆史的跨学科和跨边界潜力，也很少采用国际或比较的视角来更广泛地了解图书馆与其所在社区之间的关系。在1850年英国通过《公共图书馆法》之前的两个世纪里，图书馆在英国、欧洲和北美以各种各样令人困惑的组织模式激增，没有一个是现代意义上的“公共”。图书馆的出现是为了服务于特定的社区，反映了驻军、移民船只、监狱、学校、教堂、机械研究所、工厂、米尔斯以及医生和律师的非正式网络的专业需求。图书馆是新兴的休闲产业的一部分，可以从旅馆、酒馆、银行、火车站和咖啡馆的小经营者那里租书，也可以从与小说兴起有关的城市流通图书馆租书。订阅图书馆、图书馆协会、图书俱乐部和其他专有机构为对话、辩论和社交提供了一个论坛，并为新政治思想的传播做出了重要贡献。这些图书馆不是现代意义上的“公共”，由纳税人支持，免费向整个社区出借书籍，但它们是启蒙“公共领域”的重要组成部分。它们服务于不同的社区，为公民、宗教、政治和商业价值观的融合和重叠提供了一个空间。他们作为社区发展起来，塑造了成员的知识视野，并标志着一系列集体身份，表达了文化归属和差异的概念。该网络将审查不同类型的图书馆如何与地方、国家和国际读者群体互动。我们将评估图书馆对各种印刷品的流通和接收以及对在不同人群中形成集体认同所做的贡献。该网络对社会和性别历史具有更广泛的影响，不仅包括不同类型的图书馆采用的排斥策略，而且还包括获得文学为社会某些阶层打开的社会流动潜力。在此过程中，这项研究将为当前关于公共图书馆在塑造社区和通过扫盲促进社会流动方面的作用的辩论提供信息。由于图书馆大约同时出现在英国、北美和欧洲大陆，图书馆为比较历史提供了巨大的潜力，但尚未得到充分利用--各地区采用了独特的组织模式，但却消费着一种非常相似的国际畅销书标准。该网络将从比较的角度评估图书馆的出现，询问图书馆提供和管理的模式在不同的社会环境和政治制度之间传播、讨论、模仿和挑战的程度。特别是，该网络将评估大西洋范式对图书馆历史的解释力，询问大西洋图书馆与世界其他地方的图书馆有多大区别，或者全球视角是否更有助于解释图书馆提供的不同模式的出现。

This Research Network will investigate the cultural history of libraries at the dawn of the modern age. The recent upsurge in interest in the history of reading has opened up numerous new interpretative avenues for scholars. Libraries, book clubs, and reading circles have attracted particular attention, as scholars seek to recover the physical, administrative, and cultural environments in which reading took place. Yet such research has tended to be conducted within disciplinary boundaries, without fully embracing the interdisciplinary and boundary-crossing potential of Library History, and rarely employing international or comparative perspectives to reach a broader understanding of the relationship between libraries and the communities that host them.In the two centuries before the passage of the Public Libraries Act in the UK in 1850, libraries proliferated across the UK, Europe and North America on a bewildering variety of organizational models, none of which were 'public' in the modern sense. Libraries emerged to serve particular communities, reflecting the specialist demands of military garrisons, emigrant vessels, prisons, schools, churches, mechanics institutes, factories, mills, and informal networks of medical men and lawyers. Libraries were part of the newly emerging leisure industry, with books available for hire from smallscale operators in inns, taverns, banks, railway stations, and coffee houses, and from the sprawling city circulating libraries associated with the rise of the novel. Subscription libraries, library societies, book clubs, and other proprietary institutions provided a forum for conversation, debate and sociability, and made a key contribution to the spread of new political ideas. These libraries were not 'public' in the modern sense, supported by the taxpayer and lending books free of charge to the whole community, but they were a crucial part of an Enlightened 'public sphere'. They served different communities, providing a space where civic, religious, political, and commercial values converged and overlapped. They developed as communities in their own right, shaping the intellectual horizons of members, and signaling a range of collective identities that expressed concepts of cultural belonging and difference. The Network will examine how different types of library interacted with local, national and international communities of readers. We will assess the contribution made by libraries to the circulation and reception of print of all kinds, and to the forging of collective identities amongst discreet groups of people. The Network has broader implications for social and gender history, encompassing not only the exclusionary tactics employed by libraries of different kinds, but also the potential for social mobility that access to literature opened up for certain sections of society. In the process, the research will inform current debates about the role of public libraries in shaping communities and promoting social mobility through literacy today.Since they emerged in Britain, North America and continental Europe at around the same time, libraries offer tremendous potential for comparative history that has yet to be fully exploited - with territories adopting distinctive organisational models, yet consuming a remarkably similar canon of international bestsellers. The Network will assess the emergence of libraries in comparative perspective, asking how far models of library provision and administration were disseminated, discussed, imitated, and challenged as they travelled between different social environments and political regimes. In particular, the Network will assess the explanatory power of the Atlantic paradigm for library history, asking how far Atlantic libraries were distinctive from libraries elsewhere in the world, or whether a global perspective is more useful in explaining the emergence of different models of library provision.