Diffusion of the Discourse on Love of Reading in Europe from the 18th till the 20th Century

When reading in the 18th century became an activity common among an ever growing part of the European population and thereby a socially more visible cultural phenomenon, a need arose to create concepts and linguistic terms to refer to the new types of reading behavior. The new masses of readers did not seemingly have a rational goal for their reading, they just read for the sake of reading itself. Therefore, an explanation for their behavior was...