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  • Book Thieves: Theft and Literary Culture in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Australia

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    PiperPUB1583.pdf (234.3Kb)
    Author(s)
    Piper, Alana
    Griffith University Author(s)
    Piper, Alana J.
    Year published
    2017
    Metadata
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    Abstract
    Book thieves were a familiar figure to the reading public of Australia and other English-speaking nations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Their exploits were covered in books about books, library and medical journals, and in newspapers that reported their appearances in court, and treated them as a humorous oddity in other coverage. This article examines the historic concerns and assumptions about book thieves, as well as what these tropes reveal about prevailing discourses regarding thieves more generally. The book thief – invariably constructed in the popular imagination as a middle-class male – was ...
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    Book thieves were a familiar figure to the reading public of Australia and other English-speaking nations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Their exploits were covered in books about books, library and medical journals, and in newspapers that reported their appearances in court, and treated them as a humorous oddity in other coverage. This article examines the historic concerns and assumptions about book thieves, as well as what these tropes reveal about prevailing discourses regarding thieves more generally. The book thief – invariably constructed in the popular imagination as a middle-class male – was a classed and gendered figure, one at odds with contemporary understandings of theft as an act committed by members of an uncultured criminal class. By scrutinizing the development of popular conceptions of the book thief as an entity clearly distinguishable from the ordinary thief, I demonstrate the centrality of literacy and literary culture to how thieves themselves were read.
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    Journal Title
    Cultural and Social History
    DOI
    https://doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2016.1237447
    Copyright Statement
    © 2016 Taylor & Francis (Routledge). This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Cultural and Social History on 11 Oct 2016, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/14780038.2016.1237447
    Note
    This publication has been entered into Griffith Research Online as an Advanced Online Version.
    Subject
    Cultural studies not elsewhere classified
    Historical studies
    Publication URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/10072/123952
    Collection
    • Journal articles

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