Books in the New Directions in Book History series

Bookshelves in the Age of the COVID-19 Pandemic provides the first detailed scholarly investigation of the cultural phenomenon of bookshelves (and the social practices around them) since the start of the pandemic in March 2020. With a foreword by Lydia Pyne, author of Bookshelf (2016), the volume brings together 17 scholars from 6 countries (Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, and the USA) with expertise in literary studies, book history, publishing, visual arts, and pedagogy to critically examine the role of bookshelves during the current pandemic. This volume interrogates the complex relationship between the physical book and its digital manifestation via online platforms, a relationship brought to widespread public and scholarly attention by the global shift to working from home and the rise of online pedagogy. It also goes beyond the (digital) bookshelf to consider bookselling, book accessibility, and pandemic reading habits.

Peter Carey: The Making of a Global Novelist recounts Peter Carey¿s literary career from his emergence in the Australian literary scene as a contributor to local literary magazines to when he published his fiction exclusively with large conglomerate publishers. As Australiäs most decorated author for a period nearing half a century, Carey¿s career gives unparalleled insights into the global contemporary publishing and the making of global literary prestige from the periphery, and significant cultural currency for Australian literature and culture worldwide. Carey¿s fiction is not only a product of the global dynamic in literary publishing of the last quarter of the twentieth century, but also it holds something of its productive tension for Australian writing and writers. Allahyari retraces the fraught synthesis of an individual literary proclivity with a growing commercial cultural appetite: the coincidence of Carey¿s career with the conglomeration of global publishing pushed further towards anti-elitist, popular aesthetics.

The Sin of Writing and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature contends that the processes of enlightenment, modernization, and secularization in nineteenth-century Eastern European Jewish society were marked not by a reading revolution but rather by a writing revolution, that is, by a revolutionary change in this society's attitude toward writing. Combining socio-cultural history and literary studies and drawing on a large corpus of autobiographies, memoirs, and literary works of the period, the book sets out to explain the curious absence of writing skills and Hebrew grammar from the curriculum of the traditional Jewish education system in Eastern Europe. It shows that traditional Jewish society maintained a conspicuously oral literacy culture, colored by fears of writing and suspicions toward publication. It is against this background that the young yeshiva students undergoing enlightenment started to ¿sin by writing,¿ turning writing and publication in Hebrew into the cornerstone of their constitution as autonomous, enlightened, male Jewish subjects, and setting the foundations for the rise of modern Hebrew literature.

The Contemporary Small Press: Making Publishing Visible addresses the contemporary literary small press in the US and UK from the perspective of a range of disciplines.

The Novel as Network: Forms, Ideas, Commodities engages with the contemporary Anglophone novel and its derivatives and by-products such as graphic novels, comics, podcasts, and Quality TV.

Building on insights from the fields of textual criticism, bibliography, narratology, authorship studies, and book history, The Preface: American Authorship in the Twentieth Century examines the role that prefaces played in the development of professional authorship in America.

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.

Titles examined include: The Irish Magazine, and Monthly Asylum for Neglected Biography and The Irish Farmers' Journal, and Weekly Intelligencer;

Marginal Notes: Social Reading and the Literal Margins offers an account of literary marginalia based on original research from a range of unique archival sources, from mid-16th-century France to early 20th-century Tasmania.

Drawing on comparative literary studies, postcolonial book history, and multiple, literary, and alternative modernities, this collection approaches the study of alternative literary modernities from the perspective ofcomparative print culture.

The Sin of Writing and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature contends that the processes of enlightenment, modernization, and secularization in nineteenth-century Eastern European Jewish society were marked not by a reading revolution but rather by a writing revolution, that is, by a revolutionary change in this society's attitude toward writing. Combining socio-cultural history and literary studies and drawing on a large corpus of autobiographies, memoirs, and literary works of the period, the book sets out to explain the curious absence of writing skills and Hebrew grammar from the curriculum of the traditional Jewish education system in Eastern Europe. It shows that traditional Jewish society maintained a conspicuously oral literacy culture, colored by fears of writing and suspicions toward publication. It is against this background that the young yeshiva students undergoing enlightenment started to ¿sin by writing,¿ turning writing and publication in Hebrew into the cornerstone of their constitution as autonomous, enlightened, male Jewish subjects, and setting the foundations for the rise of modern Hebrew literature.

Gender and Prestige in Literature: Contemporary Australian Book Culture explores the relationship between gender, power, reputation and book publishing's consecratory institutions in the Australian literary field from 1965-2015. Focusing on book reviews, literary festivals and literary prizes, this work analyses the ways in which these institutions exist in an increasingly cooperative and generative relationship in the contemporary publishing industry, a system designed to limit field transformation. Taking an intersectional approach, this research acknowledges that a number of factors in addition to gender may influence the reception of an author or a title in the literary field and finds that progress towards equality is unstable and non-linear. By combining quantitative data analysis with interviews from authors, editors, critics, publishers and prize judges Alexandra Dane maps the circulation of prestige in Australian publishing, addressing questions around gender, identity, literary reputation, literary worth and the resilience of the status quo that have long plagued the field.

Writing Cultures and Literary Media combines compelling accounts of book trends, reader reception, and interviews with writers and publishers to reveal fresh insights for students, practitioners, and scholars of writing, publishing, and communications.

This book provides a historical study on the evolution of editorial style and its progress towards standardisation through an examination of early modern English style guides.

This open access collection of essays examines the literary advice industry since its emergence in Anglo-American literary culture in the mid-nineteenth century within the context of the professionalization of the literary field and the continued debate on creative writing as art and craft.

This open access Pivot book is a comparative study of six early colonial public libraries in nineteenth-century Australia, South Africa, and Southeast Asia.

Through what he terms "bibliographical sociology", Suman Gupta explores the presence of English-language publications in the contemporary Indian context - their productions, circulations and readerships - to understand current social trends.

The Novel as Network: Forms, Ideas, Commodities engages with the contemporary Anglophone novel and its derivatives and by-products such as graphic novels, comics, podcasts, and Quality TV.

Situated at the crossroads of American studies, literary studies, book studies, and media studies, these essays show that a sustained focus on the medial and material formats of literary communication significantly expands our accustomed ways of doing cultural studies.

The emergence of digital technologies in the realm of archives has enlivened our understandings of archival materialities and lent a new intensity to our engagements with the archived page by prompting us to consider the potential of paper and the page in ways that we have hitherto largely ignored.

The Contemporary Small Press: Making Publishing Visible addresses the contemporary literary small press in the US and UK from the perspective of a range of disciplines.

Drawing on comparative literary studies, postcolonial book history, and multiple, literary, and alternative modernities, this collection approaches the study of alternative literary modernities from the perspective ofcomparative print culture.

This book addresses the gap between print and digital scholarly approaches by combining both praxis and theory in a case study of a new international collaborative digital project, the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP).

This book presents the story of a unique collection of 140 manuscripts of 'learned magic' that was sold for a fantastic sum within the clandestine channels of the German book trade in the early eighteenth century.

This book takes up the obtrusive problem of visual representation of fiction in contemporary Russian book design.

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