Close Reading as Attentional Practice
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Attention studies
Category=DSA
Category=DSB
Category=JBCC
close reading
cognitive literary studies
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eq_biography-true-stories
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eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
history of ideas
history of science
Product details
- ISBN 9781399521116
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 30 Nov 2025
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Modernity of the digital age is beset by accusations that we are more distracted than ever, and that attention spans have become problematically compressed. It is an important moment, then, to explore the capacity of the tools of 'close reading' offered by our humanities disciplines to help develop and enable self-reflexivity around our attentional practices. These practices did not begin with the famous proponents of the early twentieth century but have been in formation since at least the Middle Ages. Exploring examples from the twelfth to the twentieth century, this book explores how methods of reading closely have been tools over the centuries for changing or challenging attentional habits and therefore changing the way the world is experienced.
Marion Thain is Professor of Culture and Technology at the University of Edinburgh and Director of Edinburgh Futures Institute. She publishes primarily on the relationship between culture and technology (understood in the broadest terms) and her current projects sit within the interdisciplinary field of attention studies. See marionthain.org for more details. Ewan Jones is Associate Professor of English at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Coleridge and the Philosophy of Poetic Form (2014) and The Turn of Rhythm: How Victorian Poetry Shaped a Concept (2023), along with numerous articles on prosody, poetics, digital humanities and pedagogy, for journals that include Critical Inquiry, Representations and ELH.
