Reveals the experience of reading in many cultures and across the ages

Covers pornography and the origins of the transgender movement Explores everyday reading in Nazi Germany Analyses prison reading Examines reading in revolutionary societies and occupied nations

Subversive Readers explores the strategies used by readers to question authority, challenge convention, resist oppression, assert their independence and imagine a better world. This kind of insurgent reading may be found everywhere: in revolutionary France and Nazi Germany, in Eastern Europe under Communism and in Australian and Iranian prisons, among eighteenth-century women reading history and nineteenth-century men reading erotica, among postcolonial Africans, the blind, and pioneering transgender activists.