Books in the Studies in Publishing History: Manuscript, Print, Digital series

Charles Dickens's last finished novel, Our Mutual Friend is notable for what it reveals about Dickens as an author and about Victorian publishing more generally. Sean Grass's publishing history details the novel's writing, serialization, contemporary reception, subsequent editions, and recent critical and popular revaluation.

In this book, the author examines the interaction between the private composition process and the public life of Joyce's 'Work in Progress', from the creation of the separate sections through their publication in periodicals and as separately published sections.

Poetic miscellanies have been almost entirely neglected in studies of ShakespeareΓÇÖs textual transmission and canonical rise. And yet, during the eighteenth century alone, more than 850 fragments of Shakespearean texts were inserted into the centuryΓÇÖs miscellanies: each has a textual history that reshapes our understanding of how his texts were circulated, appropriated and read. Through quantitative analysis and comparative close readings, Christopher Salamone investigates patterns in the form, quantity and selection of Shakespeare''s texts, exposing the editorial methods by which compilers came to terms with changing cultural conceptions of Shakespeare. Offering readers a buffet of literary extracts, compilers selected isolated and often indexed passages suitable for those wishing to dip into only the pithiest, most eloquent and most useful Shakespearean snippets. Today, many readers also experience Shakespeare in fragments, through soliloquys and specific phrases or couplets that are so well known as to be considered commonplace. Salamone traces the role that eighteenth-century miscellanies played in making Shakespeare''s works part of the discourse of everyday life.