Leslie Howsam, President of SHARP and University Professor, University of Windsor, Canada, writes:
What have been the most innovative monographs in the field of book history published in the past 20 years, since the foundation of SHARP in 1991? The question arose a couple of months ago when I read, on Twitter, the feedback and controversy generated by History Today. Their editors celebrated the popular history magazine’s 30th anniversary by surveying readers and interviewing prominent historians about ‘the most important historian’ and ‘favourite works of history’ over the past 60 years.
SHARP had an anniversary of its own in 2011, and our society has even generated a list of potential ‘best books’, the record of winners of the SHARP De Long Book History Book Prize. But recent SHARP blog posts by Amadio Arboleda and Claire Squires show us that those awards were arrived at with difficulty, and some deserving works are bound to have been overlooked. Others will have emerged into prominence too late for the cycle of prize giving.
To start what I hope will be a vigorous discussion in the comments section below, I’ll put forward a book we discussed last semester in my own graduate class on the history of the book. I am a huge admirer of Isabel Hofmeyr’s The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress (published in 2004 by Princeton University Press). It tells the story of the transnational circulation of John Bunyan’s 17th-century work, regarded by many as quintessentially English, but redefined in Hofmeyr’s hands as ineluctably African. She stresses translation, translatability and circulation, and her approach to some 80 translations is ‘guided by a method of keeping one’s eye on the book as a material object’.
That’s my vote for one of the most innovative monographs of the past two decades. What’s yours?
