Literary Cultures and the Material Book

While the technological hype that dominated the 1990s eventually collided with reality and subsided, one of the period’s most tenacious ideas has not: the conviction that the future of books is in jeopardy. Yet the promise—or peril—of widespread textual availability on the Internet, along with the economic pressures of globalization, has had the unexpected beneficial effect of sparking interest in the relatively young discipline of the history of the book.
The essays collected in Literary Cultures and the Material Book cast a wide net—from China and Russia to South America and New Zealand—to investigate the vital relationship between actual, physical books and the study of literary cultures. How books are created, sold, and experienced as material objects is a fascinating and little understood element of literary culture, and the contributors to this volume build on the pioneering work of earlier scholars to bring the discipline into the present. As books enter uncharted and uncertain territory in the twenty-first century, understanding their impact on our globalized culture is more important than ever.

Simon Eliot is professor of the history of the book in the School of Advanced Study at the University of London. He is editor of the journal Publishing History and coeditor of The Blackwell Companion to the History of the Book.Andrew Nash is a lecturer in English literature at the University of Reading and editor of The Culture of Collected Editions.Ian Willison is a senior research fellow in the Institute of English Studies at the University of London and is one of the general editors of the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain.