Based on a conference
hosted by the CHB this series of nine scholarly essays
focuses on the book as it helped facilitate commerce
and culture over the last five centuries. Leading scholars
explore difficult questions arising from the unique
relationships that have existed for centuries between
economics and literary culture.
This work opens
with an insight of the kinds of transformation that
texts can be seen to undergo as they cross and recross
ontological boundaries. 'Orality Lost: Text and Voice
in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries' by
Roger Chartier explores the complex
manoeuvres involved in the movement between orality,
manuscript, and print. A similar theme is pursued by
Sylvia Huot in 'The Writer's Mirror:
Watriquet de Couvin and the Development of the Author-Centered
Book', in which she explores the transition of the manuscript
from being a reader-centered item to an author-centered
presentation of works.
Several other
essays explore the deep and mutually implicating relationship
that has existed between economics and literary culture.
In 'Book Ventures, Cultured Capital and Enduring Reputation
in the Italian Renaissance' by Lisa Jardine,
she examines the role of the book as “objet d'art”
in addition to its function as repository for text.
Wallace Kirsop's 'Patronage Across
Frontiers: Subscription Publishing in French in Enlightenment
Europe' traces the dissemination of French literature
across the globe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, showing the extent to which communications
networks and political disruption all helped to shape
the intellectual life of the period. James Raven's
'Commodification and Value: Interactions in Book Traffic
to North America, c. 1750-1820' offers an account of
the sometimes difficult, and often eventful, book-trade
links between Britain and America. Fiona Black's
Beyond Boundaries: Books in the Canadian Northwest offers
insight on how books served in important ways to create
and sustain new international routes. Bill Bell's
'Cultural Baggage: The Scottish Emigrant Reader in the
Nineteenth Century' reveals how cultural values were
often reproduced, and even sometimes modified, through
the use of books and reading in exile. These geo-political
relations are set in a broader context in I.R.
Willison's 'Across Boundaries: The History
of the Book and National and International Literatures
in English' in which he offers an illuminating survey
of the many places where today the history of the book
can be seen to meet other intellectual fields.
The last essay,
'George Saintsbury: Criticism and Connoisseurship' by
Alan Bell, shows the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries having a proliferation
in the publication of series, dedicated to biography,
history, and literary criticism, often presented as
specimens for appreciation.
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