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This book history scrutinizes the production, advertising, contents, compilation and circulation – locally and globally – of an Arabic-language volume of biographies of world women, al-Durr al-manthur fi tabaqat rabbat al-khudur. The analysis of this volume of over 500 folio-size pages views it as an early work of Arab feminist history within the prolific career of Zaynab Fawwaz (c1850-1914), a Lebanese immigrant to Egypt and early feminist writer there. The study considers how Fawwaz drew on the venerable tradition of biography writing in Arabic but also turned to contemporary sources (magazines, an encyclopedia, world histories); how she centred Arab subjects and Islamic history but included women from across the world and from ancient eras right up to the fin-de-siècle; how she incorporated a quiet celebration of Shi‘i women (of which she was one), especially from the early Islamic period; how the work suggests a collective and cooperative female intellectual presence in the 1890s Arab capitals, and also responds to works on women’s history by her male contemporaries; and how Fawwaz’s writing became implicated in the project for a Women’s Library at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

This volume provides the first comparative survey of the relations between the two most active book worlds in Eurasia between 1450 and 1850. Prominent scholars in book history explore different approaches to publishing, printing, and book culture. They discuss the extent of technology transfer and book distribution between the two regions and show how much book historians of East Asia and Europe can learn from one another by raising new questions, exploring remarkable similarities and differences in these regions’ production, distribution, and consumption of books. The chapters in turn show different ways of writing transnational comparative history. Whereas recent problems confronting research on European books can instruct researchers on East Asian book production, so can the privileged role of noncommercial publications in the East Asian textual record highlight for historians of the European book the singular contribution of commercial printing and market demands to the making of the European printed record. Likewise, although production growth was accompanied in both regions by a wider distribution of books, woodblock technology’s simplicity and mobility allowed for a shift in China of its production and distribution sites farther down the hierarchy of urban sites than was common in Europe. And, the different demands and consumption practices within these two regions’ expanding markets led to different genre preferences and uses as well as to the growth of distinctive female readerships. A substantial introduction pulls the work together and the volume ends with an essay that considers how these historical developments shape the present book worlds of Eurasia.

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.

William Faulkner’s first ventures into print culture began far from the world of highbrow publishing with which he is typically associated—the world of New York publishing houses, little magazines, and literary prizes—though they would come to encompass that world as well. This collection explores Faulkner’s multifaceted engagements, as writer and reader, with the US and international print cultures of his era, along with the ways in which these cultures have mediated his relationship with a variety of twentieth- and twenty-first-century audiences. The essays gathered here address the place of Faulkner and his writings in the creation, design, publishing, marketing, reception, and collecting of books, in the culture of twentieth-century magazines, journals, newspapers, and other periodicals (from pulp to avant-garde), in the history of modern readers and readerships, and in the construction and cultural politics of literary authorship. Six contributors focus on Faulkner’s sensational 1931 novel Sanctuary as a case study illustrating the author’s multifaceted relationship to the print ecology of his time, tracing the novel’s path from the wellsprings of Faulkner’s artistic vision to the novel’s reception among reviewers, tastemakers, intellectuals, and other readers of the early 1930s. Faulkner’s midcentury critical rebranding as a strictly highbrow modernist, disdainful of the market and impervious to literary trends or the corruption of commerce, has buried the much more interesting complexity of his ongoing engagements with print culture and its engagements with him. This collection will spur critical interest in the intersection of Faulkner’s writing career and the unrespectable, experimental, and audacious realities of interwar and Cold War print culture.

Virginia Woolf and the World of Books examines Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press as a key intervention in modernist and women's writing and mark its importance to independent publishing, bookselling, and print culture at large. The research in this volume coincides with the centenary of the founding of Hogarth Press in 1917, thus making a timely addition to scholarship on the Woolfs and print culture.

While the twenty-first century has brought a wealth of new digital resources for researching late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century serials, the subfield of Romantic periodical studies has remained largely inchoate. This collection sets out to begin tackling this problem, offering a basic groundwork for a branch of periodical studies that is distinctive to the concerns, contexts and media of Britain’s Romantic age. Featuring eleven chapters by leading experts on the subject, it showcases the range of methodological, conceptual and literary-historical insights to be drawn from just one of the era’s landmark literary periodicals, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Drawing in particular on the trove of newly digitised content, specific essays model how careful analyses of the incisive and often inflammatory commentary, criticism and original literature from Blackwood’s first two decades (1817–37) might inform and expand many of the most vibrant contemporary discussions surrounding British Romanticism.