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This book examines the production and use of Bibles in late medieval and early modern England. The analysis of hundreds of biblical manuscripts and prints reveals how scribes, printers, readers, and patrons have reacted to religious and political turmoil. Looking at the modification of biblical manuscripts, or the changes introduced into subsequent printed editions, reveals the ways in which commerce and devotions joined to shape biblical access. The book explores the period from c.1200 to 1553, which saw the advent of moveable-type print as well as the Reformation. The book’s long-view places both technological and religious transformation in a new perspective. The book progresses chronologically, starting with the mass-produced innovative Late Medieval Bible, which has often been linked to the emerging universities and book-trade of the thirteenth century. The second chapter explores Wycliffite Bibles, arguing against their common affiliation with groups outside Church orthodoxy. Rather, it demonstrates how surviving manuscripts are linked to licit worship, performed in smaller monastic houses, by nuns and devout lay women and men. The third chapter explores the creation and use of the first Bible printed in England as evidence for the uncertain course of reform at the end of Henry VIII’s reign. Henry VIII’s Great Bible is studied in the following chapter. Rather than a monument to reform, a careful analysis of its materiality and use reveals it to have been a mostly useless book. The final chapter presents the short reign of Edward VI as a period of rapid transformation in Bible and worship, when some of the innovations introduced more than three hundred years earlier began, for the first time, to make sense.

Although we have more literary manuscripts from the Romantic period than for any previous period, these manuscripts have been consulted chiefly for the textual evidence they provide. This book begins the work of unearthing the alternative histories manuscripts tell us about British Romantic literary culture: describing the practices by which they were written, shared, altered and preserved; exploring the functions they served as instruments of expression and sociability; and explicating the migration of texts between the copying technologies of script and print. Deploying a range of methodologies, including quantitative approaches, it considers both literary manuscripts of texts that went unprinted during the lifetimes of their creators as well as those that were printed, presenting a capacious account of how handwritten literary documents were shared, copied, read, and valued. It describes the material processes that brought these manuscripts to audiences small and large, and preserved them for future generations. This book situates manuscript practices within an expanding print marketplace, arguing that the realms of script and print interacted to nurture and transform the period’s literary culture. Providing a comprehensive analysis of the values ascribed to literary manuscripts and the practices involved in their creation and use, this study illuminates the complex entanglements between various media. It concludes with an examination of the ongoing transformations of Romantic literary manuscripts, by textual scholars and digital humanists.

Transatlantic Modernism and the Emergence of Postcolonial Literature is a study of midcentury literary institutions integral to the formation of both modernism and postcolonial writing. Several organizations central to interwar modernism, such as the BBC, influential publishers, and university English departments, became important sites in the emergence of postcolonial literature after the war. How did some of modernism's leading figures of the 1930s, such as T.S. Eliot, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender, come to admire late colonial and early postcolonial literature in the 1950s? Similarly, why did late colonial and early postcolonial writers--including Chinua Achebe, Kamau Brathwaite, Claude McKay, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o--actively seek alliances with metropolitan intellectuals? Peter Kalliney's original archival work on modernist cultural institutions demonstrates that this disparate group of intellectuals had strong professional incentives to treat one another more as fellow literary professionals, and less as political or cultural antagonists. Surprisingly, metropolitan intellectuals and their late colonial counterparts leaned heavily on modernist theories of aesthetic autonomy to facilitate their collaborative ventures. For white, metropolitan writers, TS Eliot's notion of impersonality could help to recruit new audiences and conspirators from colonized regions of the world. For black, colonial writers, aesthetic autonomy could be used to imagine a literary sphere uniquely resistant to the forms of racial prejudice endemic to the colonial system. This strategic collaboration did not last forever, but it left a lasting imprint on the ultimate disposition of modernism and the evolution of postcolonial literature.

Cheap Modernism is the first sustained account of cheap series of reprints that transformed literary modernism from a little-read movement into a mainstream phenomenon – in Britain, Continental Europe and elsewhere. Mrs Dalloway or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are often presented as difficult books, originally published in small print runs for a handful of readers. But from the mid-1920s, these texts and others were available in cheap format across Europe. Uniform series of reprints such as the Travellers’ Library, the Phoenix Library, Tauchnitz and Albatross sold modernism to a wide audience – thus transforming a little-read “highbrow” movement into a popular phenomenon. The expansion of the readership for modernism was not only vertical (from “high” to “low”) but also spatial – since publishers’ series were distributed within and outside metropolitan centres in Britain, continental Europe and elsewhere. Many non-English native speakers discovered texts by Joyce, Woolf and others in the original language – a fact that has rarely been mentioned in histories of modernism. Drawing on extensive work in neglected archives, Cheap Modernism sheds new light on the complex relationship between modernism and the marketplace.

The Culture of War explores the unexpected flourishing of literature both high and low during the Siege of Paris at the end of the Franco-Prussian War, 1870-1871. When Prussian forces completely blockaded Paris, isolating the city from the outside world, Parisians turned to literature to resist the enemy, to fill the idle hours under siege, and to articulate their place in history. This cultural boom was a conscious effort on the part of literary institutions like newspapers, publishers, and theaters to ensure the viability of their industries during a period of political uncertainty. To do so, many publishers, editors, and directors sought legitimacy through populism, promoting literature written by anonymous and unknown authors or that spoke to populist ideas. A study of national tragedy on a local scale, The Culture of War goes beyond traditional narratives of communal or individual psychology, and studies institutional responses to financial and political instability, viewing literature as a product of economic and political forces.

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls revealed a world of early Jewish writing larger than the Bible: from multiple versions of biblical texts to “revealed” books not found in our canon. But despite this diversity, the way we read Second Temple Jewish literature remains constrained by two anachronistic categories: a theological one, “Bible,” and a bibliographic one, “book.” The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity suggests ways of thinking about how Jews understood their own literature before these categories had emerged. Using familiar sources, such as the Psalms, Ben Sira, and Jubilees, it tells an unfamiliar story about sacred writing not bound in a Bible. In many texts, we see an awareness of a vast tradition of divine writing found in multiple locations, only partially revealed in available scribal collections. Ancient heroes like David are not simply imagined as scriptural authors, but are multidimensional characters who come to be known as great writers and honored as founders of growing textual traditions. Scribes recognize the divine origin of texts like the Enoch literature and other writings revealed to ancient patriarchs, which present themselves not as derivative of material we now call biblical, but prior to it. Sacred writing stretches back to the dawn of time, yet new discoveries are always around the corner. While listening to the way ancient writers describe their own literature—their own metaphors and narratives about writing—this book also argues for greater suppleness in our own scholarly imagination, no longer bound by modern canonical and bibliographic assumptions.