Books in the Elements in Publishing and Book Culture series

This Element contends that networks are a category of study that cuts across traditional academic barriers, uniting diverse disciplines through a shared understanding of complexity in our world. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

How is academia portrayed in children's literature? This Element ambitiously surveys fictional professors in texts marketed towards children. Professors are overwhelmingly white and male, tending to be elderly scientists who fall into three stereotypes: the vehicle to explain scientific facts, the baffled genius, and the evil madman. By the late twentieth century, the stereotype of the male, mad, muddlehead, called Professor SomethingDumb, is formed in humorous yet pejorative fashion. This Element provides a publishing history of the role of academics in children's literature, questioning the book culture which promotes the enforcement of stereotypes regarding intellectual expertise in children's media. The Element is also available, with additional material, as Open Access.

The creation of texts preserves culture, literature, myth, and society, and provides invaluable insights into history. Yet we still have much to learn about the history of how those texts were produced and how the production of texts has influenced modern societies, particularly in smaller nations like Wales. The story of publishing in Wales is closely connected to the story of Wales itself. Wales, the Welsh people, and the Welsh language have survived invasion, migration, oppression, revolt, resistance, religious and social upheaval, and economic depression. The books of Wales chronicle this story and the Welsh people's endurance over centuries of challenges. Ancient law-books, medieval manuscripts, legends and myths, secretly printed religious works, poetry, song, social commentary, and modern novels tell a story of a tiny nation, its hardy people, and an enduring literary legacy that has an outsized influence on culture and literature far beyond the Welsh borders.

Voluntary societies and government initiatives stimulated the growth of reading communities in South Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century. A system of Parliamentary grants to establish public libraries in country towns and villages nurtured a lively reading culture. A condition was that the library should be open free-of-charge to the general public. This became one more reading space, and others included book societies, reading societies, literary societies, debating societies, mechanics institutes, and mutual improvement societies. This Element explains how reading communities used these spaces to promote cultural and literary development in a unique ethos of improvement, and to raise political awareness in South Africa's colonial transition to a Union government and racial segregation.

Publishing Scholarly Editions offers new intellectual tools for publishing digital editions that bring readers closer to the experimental practices of literature, editing, and reading. Sections 1 and 2 frame intentionality and data analysis as intersubjective, interrelated, and illustrative of experience-as-experimentation. In them, I explore these ideas in two editorial projects of nineteenth-century works: Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor and the anti-slavery anthology The Bow in the Cloud, edited by Mary Anne Rawson. Section 3 uses philosophical Pragmatism to rethink editorial principles and data modelling, arguing for a broader conception of the edition rooted in data collections and experience. The Conclusion draws attention to the challenges of publishing digital editions, and why they have failed to be supported by the publishing industry. If publications are conceived as pragmatic 'inventions' based on reliable, open-access data collections, then editing will embrace the critical, aesthetic, and experimental affordances of editions of experience.

Edited collections are widely supposed to contain lesser work than scholarly journals. After examining the origins of this critique, this Element explores the modern history of the edited collection and the particular roles it has played as a model of collaboration, trust and mutual obligation.

A key challenge facing all educators working in practice-based subjects is the need to negotiate tensions between past and present and provide a training that prepares students for fast-changing conditions, while also conveying long-standing principles. This Element therefore investigates how effectively editing and publishing programmes prepare graduates for industry and how well these graduates translate this instruction to the workplace. Taking a global perspective to gauge the state of the discipline, the mixed-methods approach used for this Element comprised two online surveys for educators and graduates, three semi-structured interviews with industry practitioners (scholarly, education and trade) and ethnographic practice (author as educator and practitioner). Three key concepts also framed this Element's enquiry: being, learning and doing. The Element demonstrates how these transitioning but interdependent concepts have the potential to form a holistic practice-led pedagogy for students of editing and publishing programmes.

Examines a watershed moment in the recent history of digital publishing through a case study of the pre-web, serious hypertext periodical, the Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext (1994-1995). It deepens our understanding of the North American publishing industry's history and contributes to the overdue preservation of early digital writing.

While the term 'bestseller' explicitly relates books to sales, commercially successful books are also products of individual creative work. This Element presents a new perspective on the relationship between art and the market, with particular reference to bestselling writers and books.

This study focuses on the spread of print in colonial India towards the middle and end of the nineteenth century. This Element will look at this phenomenon in eastern India, and survey how printing spread from Calcutta to centres such as Hooghly-Chinsurah, Murshidabad, Burdwan, Rangpur etc.

Natural language generation (NLG) is the process wherein computers produce output in readable human languages. Such output takes many forms, including news articles, sports reports, prose fiction, and poetry. This Element considers how NLG conforms to and confronts traditional understandings of authorship and what it means to be a reader.

Wiradjuri woman, Anita Heiss, is arguably one of the first Aboriginal Australian authors of popular fiction. In this Element a focus on the political characterises her chick lit; and her identity as an author is both supplemented and complemented by her roles as an academic, activist and public intellectual.

The legal publishing industry in Africa campaigns to convince people to scorn pirates and plagiarists as a criminal underclass, and to instead purchase copyrighted, barcoded works that have the look of legitimacy about them. This Element is a study of the emergence of new forms of reading in English in African cities.

This is a history of Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, a database of over 180,000 titles. Published by Gale in 2003 it has had an enormous impact of the study of the eighteenth century. An essential aspect of this Element is how it explores the socio-cultural and technological debates around the access to old books.

Defines the academic bookshop, text, and market. Examines change drivers in worldwide markets. Draws on current research from commercial publishers and publishing interest groups. Includes quantitative and qualitative research data from academic booksellers. Argues that academic booksellers can lead a sustainable and equitable future for the academic text.

The Frankfurt Book Fair is the leading global industry venue for rights sales, facilitating book deals and building and maintaining international networks. This Element explores the production of bestsellers at the Fair, through an investigation involving three consecutive years of fieldwork (2017-2019).

In the twentieth century, cumulative millions of readers received books by mail from clubs like Book-of-the-Month Club. This Element offers an introduction to book clubs as a distribution channel and cultural phenomenon, and shows that book clubs and book commerce are linked inextricably. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The Christmas book market has played an important role in the growth of children's literature. Starting with the eighteenth century and continuing to recent sales successes and picturebooks, Christmas Books for Children investigates continuities and new trends in this hugely significant part of the children's book market.

This Element examines four key questions raised by the prospect of a fantasy canon: the way in which canon and genre influence each other; the overwhelming presence of Tolkien in any discussion of the classics of fantasy; the multi-media and transmedia nature of the field; and the push for a more inclusive and diverse canon.

Considering young adult fantasy (YA fantasy) texts alongside the way they are circulated and marketed, this Element aims to show that the YA fantasy genre is a dynamic formation that takes shape and reshapes itself responsively in a continuing process over time.

This Element is founded upon research conducted with seventeen teens and young adults who identify themselves as readers of comics for pleasure. These interviews provide insights about how comics reading evolves with the readers and their overall reading experience. Special attention is paid to the place of female readers in the comics community.

Through readings of key figures like H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, this Element argues that changes in publishing and distribution were crucial to the expansion of science fiction. Suitable for anybody interested in the reasons why science fiction went from being a niche variety of fantastical adventure into the global culture it is today.

Harry Potter fans contribute their immaterial and affective labor in multiple arenas. Fan participation in the Harry Potter universe has contributed to its success. Outlines the context and theoretical frameworks that support an analysis of the fan experience and examines tensions between fans and Warner Bros.

This Element is for anyone interested in the processes of canon-formation, world literatures in general and African literature in particular. It offers a fresh and exciting perspective on canon-formation and contestation that draws on original archival and field research.

Explores contemporary authorship via three key authorial roles: indie publisher, hybrid author, and fanfiction writer. Examines how digital and networked media allow writers to distribute their work directly to - and often in collaboration with - their readers. These writers tend to favor publishing platforms that generate attention capital.

Demonstrates that rather than Penguin Classics' frequently cited 'general reader', a more academic market contributed to the success of these titles. Investigates the publication of medieval French literature on this list and shines a light on the drivers, motivations, negotiations and decision-making processes behind it.

Contributes to the ongoing debate on what it meant to publish a book in manuscript. Offers case-studies of twelfth-century Anglo-Norman historians. Argues that their contemporary success was a result of successfully conducted publishing activities. This Element is also available as Open Access.