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Troy J. Bassett, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Three-Volume Novel. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. ISBN 978-3-030-31925-0 $84.99 (hardcover), $64.99 (ebook).
Utilizing recent developments in book history and digital humanities, this book offers a cultural, economic, and literary history of the Victorian three-volume novel, the prestige format for the British novel during much of the nineteenth century. With the publication of Walter Scott’s popular novels in the 1820s, the three-volume novel became the standard format for new fiction aimed at middle-class audiences through the support of circulating libraries. Following a quantitative analysis examining who wrote and published these novels, the book investigates the success of publisher Richard Bentley in producing three-volume novels, the experiences of the W. H. Smith circulating library in distributing them, the difficulties of authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson and George Moore in writing them, and the resistance of new publishers such as Arrowsmith and Unwin to publishing them. Rather than faltering, the three-volume novel stubbornly endured until its abandonment in the 1890s.
Jean Lee Cole, How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American culture, 1895-1920. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2020.ISBN: 9781496826527 (hardcover); 9781496826534 (paperback). US$99 (hardcover); US$30 (paperback).
How the Other Half Laughs examines how the early newspaper comic strip emerged in the closing years of the nineteenth century in the pages of newspapers including Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s Journal-American, and traces how it influenced popular fiction, illustration, and art of the period.
Peggy Lynn Kelly and Carole Gerson, Hearing More Voices: English Canadian Women in Print and on the Air, 1914-1960. Ottawa, CA: Tecumseh Press, 2020. ISBN 9781896133713 (softcover); ISBN 9781896133737 (HTML). Canadiana (print) 20190204672; Canadiana (ebook) 20190204680. CA$24.95
Hearing
More Voices analyzes
the working lives and professional output of female broadcasters, authors of
radio plays, novelists, humourists, historians, journalists, and poets who
produced much of the middlebrow and modernist culture of English-speaking
Canada, from 1914 to 1960. Many under-recognized names join the few that are
currently canonical.
Amanda Golden, Annotating Modernism: Marginalia and Pedagogy from Virginia Woolf to the Confessional Poets. Abington, UK: Routledge, 2020. ISBN: 9781472410764. US$149.95 (hardback); US$134.96 (ebook).
Making extensive use of archival materials by Sylvia Plath,
John Berryman, and Anne Sexton, Amanda Golden reframes the relationship between
modernism and midcentury poetry. While Golden situates her book among other
materialist histories of modernism, she moves beyond the examination of
published works to address poets’ annotations in their personal copies of
modernist texts. A consideration of the dynamics of literary influence, Annotating
Modernism analyzes the teaching strategies of midcentury poets and the
ways they read modernists like T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Virginia
Woolf, and W. B. Yeats. Situated within a larger rethinking of modernism,
Golden’s study illustrates the role of midcentury poets in shaping modernist
discourse.
Michael Hancher, The Tenniel Illustrations to the Alice Books. 2nd edition. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2019. ISBN: 978-0-8142-1411-4. US$54.95
The
original twelve chapters of this standard account of Tenniel’s Alice illustrations are updated with
newly available information. Six new chapters examine the material
circumstances that conditioned the publication of the Alice books (wood engraving, electrotyping, printing, coloring,
reprinting), and also the importance of looking in those stories.
Clare Hutton, Serial Encounters: Ulysses and the Little Review. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019. ISBN: 9780198744078. £60
James Joyce’s Ulysses was first published in New York
in the Little Review between 1918 and 1920. What kind of reception did it have
and how does the serial version of the text differ from the version most
readers know, the iconic volume edition published in Paris in 1922 by
Shakespeare and Company? This study
fuses the methodologies of book history, textual criticism and digital
humanities in order to (1) uncover long forgotten facts relevant to the
interpretation of Ulysses and Modernism more generally and (2) open up
new readings of Joyce’s iconic masterpiece.
Ruth Panofsky, Toronto Trailblazers: Women in Canadian Publishing. Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2019. ISBN: 9781487505578 (cloth); 9781487523862 (paper).CA$63.75 (CLOTH); CA$19.47 (PAPER); CA$22.46 (eBOOK)
Toronto Trailblazers explores the influence of seven women who advanced Canada’s modern
literary culture. Individually, each woman asserted her agency by adapting
orthodox ways of working within publishing. Collectively, their approach
emerged as a feminist practice. These trailblazers disrupted the dominant
masculine paradigm and helped transform publishing practice in Canada.
Trude Dijkstra and Paul Dijstelberge, eds., Quaerendo 50 Special Issue. The Past of our Future. Moving Perspectives on Innovation and Tradition in the Book Market. Leiden: Brill, 2020. eISSN= 1570-0690; ISSN=0014-9527.
For subscription pricing see https://brill.com/view/journals/qua/qua-overview.xml
This year Quaerendo celebrates its 50th anniversary. To commemorate such an historic moment, this special issue brings together a broad range of innovative approaches to current book historical research on the theme The Past of our Future. Moving Perspectives on Innovation and Tradition in the Book Market.
Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose, eds., A Companion to the History of the Book (2 vols.). 2nd ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley/Blackwell, 2019. ISBN: 978-1-119-01820-9. US$43.99 (ebook); US$390.00 (hardcover).
This
revised and updated edition of The
Companion to the History of the Book offers a global survey of the book’s
history. It presents current research on paper, printing, binding, scientific
publishing, the history of maps, music and print, the profession of authorship,
lexicography, ancient clay tablets, archives and paperwork, Arabic script, the
Slavic, Canadian, African and Australasian book, new textual technologies, and
much more.
Mary Hammond and Jonathan Rose, eds., The Edinburgh History of Reading (4 vols.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. £350
ISBN: Volume 1, Early Readers (9781474446082)
Volume 2, Modern Readers (9781474446112)
Volume 3, Common Readers (9781474461887)
Volume 4, Subversive Readers (9781474461917)
This
collection of original essays explores reading experiences throughout the world
and in all historical periods: in ancient China, medieval Europe, the Ottoman
Empire, colonial Latin America, revolutionary France, Victorian Britain,
Czarist and Stalinist Russia, the Japanese Empire, and contemporary Africa;
reading among Confucian scholars, prisoners, the blind, music lovers, science
fiction fans, pornographers, peasants, and transgender activists.
Simon Rosenberg, Book Value Categories and the Acceptance of Technological Changes in English Book Production. Berlin: Peter Lang Verlag, 2020. ISBN: 9783631804261. EU$ 81
With
a macroscopic, comparative approach, this book looks at transitional phases of
the book of the fifteenth, nineteenth and twenty-first centuries to locate
patterns in the acceptance of new technologies. Using book value categories,
which shape the acceptance context of innovations in book production, helps us
find continuities and discontinuities.
Heiko Droste and Kirsti Salmi-Niklander, eds., Handwritten Newspapers. An Alternative Medium during the Early Modern and Modern Periods. Studia Fennica Historica 26. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2019. ISBN: 978-951-858-156-0
Open Access: https://oa.finlit.fi/site/books/10.21435/sfh.26/
Print-on-demand 45 Ç https://kirjat.finlit.fi/sivu/tuote/handwritten-newspapers/2672419
This
book is the first edited volume focusing on handwritten newspapers as an
alternative medium from a wide interdisciplinary and international perspective.
The time span ranges from the 16th to the 20th century. During these centuries,
handwritten newspapers changed from an expensive public commodity to an
internal medium for non-elite groups.
Andie Silva, The Brand of Print: Marketing Paratexts in the Early English Book Trade. Leiden: Brill, 2019. ISBN: 978-90-04-41023-7. US$165.00
The Brand of Print
examines
envoys to the reader, visual design in title pages and tables of contents, and
patron dedications. Applying terms from
contemporary marketing theory, Silva considers how print agents’ labor and
agency, made visible through paratextual design, continues to influence how we
read, study, and digitize early modern texts.
Valerie Wayne, Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. ISBN 9781350110014. US$100.00
This collection reveals the valuable work that women achieved in publishing, printing, writing and reading early modern English books, from those who worked in the book trade to those who composed, selected, collected and annotated books.
Sarah Werner, Studying Early Printed Books, 1450-1800: A Practical Guide. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell. ISBN 978-1-119-04997-5. US$99.95 (hardcover) US$27.95 (paperback).
Designed to introduce students, researchers, and librarians to the first centuries of printing, this is an accessible introduction to working with early printed books. The first half describes how books were made, from paper to press to shop. The second half focuses on using such books, whether in a library or looking at them on a computer screen. A glossary and an annotated reading list are included; the open companion site, EarlyPrintedBooks.com, provides images and teaching resources.