The complexity of print culture in Britain between the seventeenth and nineteenth century is investigated in these wide-ranging articles. The essays collected here offer examinations of bibliographical matters, publishing practices, the illustration of texts in a variety of engraved media, little studied print culture genres, the critical and editorial fortunes of individual works, and the significance of the complex interrelationships that authors entertained with booksellers, publishers, and designers. They investigate how all these relationships affected the production of print commodities and how all the agents involved in the making of books contributed to the cultural literacy of readers and the formation of a canon of literary texts. Specific topics include a bibliographical study of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and its editions from its first publication to the present day; the illustrations of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and the ways in which the interpretive matrices of book illustration conditioned the afterlife and reception of Bunyan's work; the almanac and the subscription edition; publishing history, collecting, reading, and textual editing, especially of Robert Burns's poems and James Thomson's The Seasons; the "printing for the author" practice; the illustrated and material existence of Sir Walter Scott's Waverley novels, and the Victorian periodical, The Athenaeum. Sandro Jung is Research Professor of Early Modern British Literature and Director of the Centre for the Study of Text and Print Culture at Ghent University. Contributors: Gerard Carruthers, Nathalie Collé-Bak, Marysa Demoor, Alan Downie, Peter Garside, Sandro Jung, Brian Maidment, Laura L. Runge.

Connects British and American literature to a changing media landscape in an era of innovation.

The past century's culture wars that Britain has been consumed by, but that few North Americans seem aware of, have resulted in revised notions of Britishness and British literature. Yet literary anthologies remain anchored to an archaic Anglo-English interpretation of British literature. Conflicts have been played out over specific national vs. British identity (some residents prefer to describe themselves as being from Scotland, England, Wales, or Northern Ireland instead of Britain), in debates over immigration, race, ethnicity, class, and gender, and in arguments over British literature. These debates are strikingly detailed in such chapters as: "The Difficulty Defining 'Black British'," "British Jewish Writers" and "Xenophobia and the Booker Prize." Connections are also drawn between civil rights movements in the U.S. and UK. This generalist cultural study is a lively read and a fascinating glimpse into Britain's changing identity as reflected in 20th and 21st century British literature.

This edited collection, a tribute to the late noted eighteenth-century scholar Betty Rizzo, testifies to her influence as a researcher, writer, teacher, and mentor. The essays, written by a range of established and younger eighteenth-century specialists, expand on the themes important to Rizzo: the importance of the archive, the contributions of women writers to the canon of eighteenth-century literature and to an emerging print culture, the sometimes fraught relations within the eighteenth-century family, the relationship between life and literature, and, finally, the role of female companionship in women’s lives. Divided into three sections, “Living in the Eighteenth-Century Novel,” “Living in the Eighteenth-Century World,” and “Afterlives,” the fourteen essays that form the body of the collection treat such topics as epistolarity, fraternal relations in novels and in families, women and travel in Jane Austen’s novels, the pleasures and challenges of searching through archives to understand the complex entanglements of eighteenth-century families, the changing reception of Alexander Pope’s poetry, and intersections among race, class, gender, and sexuality in a famous early-nineteenth-century Scottish libel case. The final essay of the fourteen connects the archetypal eighteenth-century figure of the seduced and abandoned woman to Sophie Calle’s 2007 Venice Biennale exhibition entitled Take Care of Yourself, which the author reads as a direct descendant of the eighteenth-century letter novel.The book is framed by an introduction that situates the book as part of the ongoing redefinition of the archive of eighteenth-century literature and an afterword that gives a personal account of Rizzo’s career and her indelible legacy as friend, mentor, and professional model. The contributors use a variety of methods in their scholarship, but a common strand is archival research and close reading inflected by feminist analysis. The book will appeal to students and scholars of eighteenth-century British literature and culture and to those interested in women’s writing and women’s relationships in the eighteenth century—and today—and in feminist literary history. The contributors to the volume practice the kind of scholarship Rizzo was known for—painstaking archival research and attention to the nuances of relationships among eighteenth-century women (and men)—and in so doing shed new light on a number of familiar and not-so-familiar eighteenth-century texts.

Presents 35 thematically organised, research-led essays on women, periodicals and print culture in Victorian Britain.

The Book in Society: An Introduction to Print Culture examines the origins and development of one of the most important inventions in human history. Books can inform, entertain, inspire, irritate, liberate, or challenge readers, and their forms can be tangible and traditional, like a printed, casebound volume, or virtual and transitory, like a screen-page of a cell-phone novel. Written in clear, non-specialist prose, The Book in Society first provides an overview of the rise of the book and of the modern publishing and bookselling industries. It explores the evolution of written texts from early forms to contemporary formats, the interrelationship between literacy and technology, and the prospects for the book in the twenty-first century. The second half of the book is based on historian Robert Darnton’s concept of a book publishing “communication circuit.” It examines how books migrate from the minds of authors to the minds of readers, exploring such topics as the rise of the modern notion of the author, the role of states and others in promoting or restricting the circulation of books, various modes of reproducing and circulating texts, and how readers’ responses help shape the form and content of the books available to them. Feature boxes highlighting key texts, individuals, and developments in the history of the book, carefully selected illustrations, and a glossary all help bring the history of the book to life.

While the gender and age of the girl may seem to remove her from any significant contribution to empire, this book provides both a new perspective on familiar girls' literature, and the first detailed examination of lesser-known fiction relating the emergence of fictional girl adventurers, castaways and 'ripping' schoolgirls to the British Empire.