Princeton University Press snaps up Turner’s Why We Read Fiction

Princeton University Press (PUP) has acquired Marion Turner’s Why We Read Fiction, a “rich and often surprising cultural history” which “shows us how reading fiction is, for many, a truly essential part of being human".

Ben Tate, senior editor, Humanities at PUP, acquired world rights including audio from Georgina Capel of Georgina Capel Associates. The book is currently scheduled for autumn 2027. 

In Why We Read Fiction, Turner –  the J R R Tolkien professor of English Literature and Language at the University of Oxford – explores the long history of our engagement with fiction, across the ages and into the present as technology changes how and why we read.

The publisher synopsis goes on: “Along the way, Turner probes why and how gendered stereotypes about who reads what persist and offers surprising comparisons to show both how much – and how little — the experience of consuming stories has changed across history. Reading national epics aloud from lavishly illustrated manuscripts is not the same as reading didactic extracts aloud to teach moral lessons to children.

“But there are many surprising similarities across time too: is the fanfiction that fills the Internet so different from medieval scribes adding in extra Canterbury Tales to ‘complete’ Chaucer’s unfinished text? Are modern book groups so different to groups of aristocratic women at court reading romances together and discussing them?"

Turner is the the author of Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton University Press) which was shortlisted for the Wolfson Prize and won the Otto Gründler Book Prize, the Beatrice White Prize, and the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize given by the The British Academy.

Her most recent book is The Wife of Bath: A Biography, published by Princeton University Press in early 2023 and named a Best Book We’ve Read This Year by the New Yorker.