Scottish Readers Remember: Reading in Scotland in the Twentieth Century

把阅读和接受作为一种社会现象来研究，现在是我们理解文学、历史和文化的核心。它已经成为图书历史中的一个既定领域。《苏格兰读者的记忆》代表了第一次持续而集中的尝试，记录了20世纪苏格兰人的阅读经历，并从他们身上分析了不断变化的品味、实践和习惯，以及阅读对个人和集体认同感的贡献。在苏格兰各社区传播的采访记录将构成证据的核心，并将通过使用档案和其他来源加以补充。前几个世纪的历史研究显然依赖于文献资料，现在有机会提供一份口头档案，为20世纪的补充研究提供素材，这是很及时的。的确，阅读曾经代表了我们对社会历史知识的巨大鸿沟，尤其是作为工人阶级经历的一个因素的阅读。在19世纪和20世纪初，乔纳森·罗斯教授和其他人利用大量的回忆录、自传和日记缩小了这一差距。以rgu为基础的Edzell公共图书馆的研究等图书馆和其他记录的使用提供了数量上的平衡。然而，这个项目也将记录60岁以上的一代人的阅读记忆。随着年龄的增长，这一代人的记忆有丧失的危险。在苏格兰或英国都没有这样连贯的阅读经历档案；对20世纪阅读的研究将在很大程度上以它为基础，这将是进一步理解个人和社会发展方面这一关键活动的先驱。

The study of reading and reception as social phenomena is now central to our understanding of literature, history and culture. It has become an established field within Book History. Scottish Readers Remember represents the first sustained and focused attempt to record the reading experiences of Scots in the twentieth century and, from them, to analyse not only changing tastes, practices, and habits but also the contribution of reading to an individual and collective sense of identity. Transcribed interviews, spread across communities in Scotland, will form the core of evidence and will be complemented by use of archival and other sources. Historical studies of previous centuries have obviously depended upon documentary sources and the opportunity to provide an oral archive from which a complementary study of the twentieth century could be written is timely. Indeed, reading once represented a large gap in our knowledge of social history, particularly reading as a factor in working-class experience. The gap has been narrowed for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Professor Jonathan Rose and others drawing on a wealth of memoirs, autobiographies and diaries. A quantitative balance has been provided by the use of library and other records such as in the RGU-based study of Edzell Public Library. However, this project will also record the reading memories of the generation that is now in its 60s and above. The memories of this generation are at risk of loss due to increasing age. There is no such coherent archive of reading experiences in Scotland or indeed the UK; the study of twentieth-century reading that will be largely based on it will be a pioneer in furthering understanding of this key activity in terms of personal and social development.