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.

• List of illustrations p. viii
• List of contributors p. xi
• Preface p. xvi Robert Darnton
• Acknowledgements p. xix
• Introduction p. 1 Simon Eliot and Andrew Nash and Ian Willison
• Some material factors in literary culture 2500BCE-1900CE p. 31 Simon Eliot
• Non-Western Traditions of the Book
• A thousand years of printed narrative in China p. 53 Glen Dudbridge
• Marketing the Tale of Genji in seventeenth-century Japan p. 65 Peter Kornicki
• Literary culture and manuscript culture in precolonial India p. 77 Sheldon Pollock
• The Shahnama and the Persian illustrated book p. 95 Robert Hillenbrand
• Towards a history of the book and literary culture in Africa p. 121 Isabel Hofmeyr
• The Western Book in History
• Epic, diffusion and identity p. 133 Christopher Carey
• Carolingian manuscript culture and the making of the literary culture of the Middle Ages p. 147 David Ganz
• Petrarca philobiblon: the author and his books p. 159 Nicholas Mann
• The diffusion of literature in Renaissance Italy: the case of Pietro Bembo p. 175 Brian Richardson
• From literary almanacs to 'thick journals': the emergence of a readership for Russian literature, 1820s-1840s p. 191 Abram Reitblat and Christine Thomas
• Language Empires
• Literary consequences of the peripheral nature of Spanish printing in the sixteenth century p. 207 Clive Griffin
• The conflicts of the canon: printing and literary culture during the Spanish Enlightenment p. 215 Maria Luisa Lopez-Vidriero
• The book and Naturalism in Spain, Portugal and Latin America p. 231 Jean-Francois Botrel
• Friedrich Nicolai: creator of the German republic of letters p. 241 Bernhard Fabian
• The German language and book trade in Europe: cultural transfers and collective identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries p. 253 Frederic Barbier
• France between literary culture and mass culture: seventeenth to twentieth centuries p. 269 Jean-Yves Mollier
• Publishing and literature in the French-speaking world: the cultural hegemony of the centre and the creative role of the periphery p. 281 Francois Vallotton
• Jacques Hebert: foremost publisher of the Quiet Revolution p. 297 Jacques Michon
• The Anglophone Tradition
• Creating an English literary canon, 1679-1720: Jacob Tonson, Dryden and Congreve p. 307 John Barnard
• Literary culture and literary publishing in inter-war Britain: a view from Chatto & Windus p. 323 Andrew Nash
• 'The elixir of life': Richard Garnett, the British Museum Library and literary London p. 343 Richard Landon
• The tradition of A. W. Pollard and the world of literary scholarship p. 355 Stephen Bury
• 'In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?' p. 367 Michael Winship
• From Methodist literary culture to Canadian literary culture: the United Church Publishing House/the Ryerson Press, 1829-1970 p. 379 Janet B. Friskney
• 'The centennial racket': J. C. Beaglehole, nationalism and the 1940 New Zealand centennial publications p. 387 Sydney J. Shep
• 'Heaven forbid that I should think of treating with an English publisher': the dilemma of literary nationalists in federated Australia p. 399 John Barnes
• Afterword
• Perspectives for an international history of the book p. 413 David McKitterick
• Index p. 431