Over 500+ pages, Rose explores and dissects the reading habits of miners, millgirls, clerks, factory workers and others to reveal what role literature played in the development of their minds. Certainly you could do a lot worse than Jonathan Rose’s expansive, door-stopper of a study, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. If this kind of thinking causes you some unease, as it does me, you probably like to have your beliefs in the importance of Great Books reinforced every now and then. How come the capitalization? Where are your quote marks of irony? Who deems what gets counted as a Great Book? Why their choices and not someone else’s? And, most severely, doesn’t the exultation of certain books simply reinforce and privilege one type of voice while silencing others? Great Books are supposed to be passé we’d all be better off if we embraced more “diverse” fare that teems with many different voices, and had no need for outdated notions of so-called “classic” literature. Whither the Great Books? In 2015, such a question is supposed to raise both problematic and programmatic issues among proper-thinking readers.
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