Exploring the intersection of publishing history, book history, and literary and cultural studies, this series supports innovative work on the cultural significance and creative impact of printing and publishing history, including reception, distribution, and translation or adaptation into other media. Proposals are welcome for interdisciplinary and comparative studies by humanities scholars and librarians working in a variety of fields, including literature; book history, periodicals history, and print culture and the sociology of texts; theater, film, and performance studies; library history; history; gender studies; and cultural studies. Topics might include, among other possibilities, publishing histories of major figures or works, of regions, of genres, or studies of particular publishers or practices (including production, distribution, and reception) that hold special aesthetic, social, or political significance. We especially welcome focused argument-driven work that investigates and historicizes new or hybrid forms of text creation and dissemination, including nonprint materials, informal, specialized or private reception and distribution networks, the translation of TV and movies into print, and multimedia publishing practices.
By Sean Grass
June 12, 2019
Even within the context of Charles Dickens's history as a publishing innovator, Our Mutual Friend is notable for what it reveals about Dickens as an author and about Victorian publishing. Marking Dickens's return to the monthly number format after nearly a decade of writing fiction designed for ...
By Cécile Cottenet
March 17, 2017
By way of a case study of one of the oldest French book agencies, Agence Hoffman, this book analyzes the role played by French literary agents in the importation of US fiction and literature into France in the years following World War II. It sheds light on the material conditions of the ...
By Jennifer Julia Sorensen
January 06, 2017
The years from 1890 through 1935 witnessed an explosion of print, both in terms of the variety of venues for publication and in the vast circulation figures and the quantity of print forums. Arguing that the formal strategies of modernist texts can only be fully understood in the context of the ...
By Richard J. Hill
December 06, 2016
Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pictorial Text explores the genesis, production and the critical appreciation of the illustrations to the fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson. Stevenson is one of the most copied and interpreted authors of the late nineteenth century, especially his novels Treasure ...
By Dirk Van Hulle
May 05, 2016
The text of Finnegans Wake is not as monolithic as it might seem. It grew out of a set of short vignettes, sections and fragments. Several of these sections, which James Joyce confidently claimed would "fuse of themselves", are still recognizable in the text of Finnegans Wake. And while they are ...
By Huw Osborne
August 14, 2015
The trade in books has always been and remains an ambiguous commercial activity, associated as it is with literature and the exchange of ideas. This collection is concerned with the cultural and economic roles of independent bookstores, and it considers how eight shops founded during the modernist ...