Books in the Studies in Text & Print Culture series

The first ever study of illustrated belles lettres publishing in eighteenth-century Scotland, the book examines the strategies underpinning the making and the marketing of illustrated books. At the same time, it sheds light on those individuals (artists, engravers, bookseller-publishers) that were involved in the production of these works.

This study investigates interpretation of a late-fourteenth-century fictional character in both verbal and visual art of the period 1660-1810. Audiovisual analysis and diachronic afterlife studies intertwine concerning the Wife of Bath in songs, scholarship, commentary, poetic paraphrases, musical theater in London and on the Continent, paintings, and book illustrations.

Using methods from book history and print culture studies, Annotation in Eighteenth-Century Poetry explores the functions that annotation performed on and through the printed page. Studying the relation of notes to poetry and the evolving layout of the book, this collection extends to recent inquiries into the rise of literature as a discipline.

The Genres of Thomson's The Seasons brings together contributions examining the different generic modes and discourses in Thomson's descriptive long poem. It aims to provide a better understanding of the generic remit of The Seasons and of the transformation of poetic genres in the eighteenth century in general.

Anglo-German Dramatic and Poetic Encounters contains essays focusing on the roles of drama and poetry in Anglo-German exchange in the Sattelzeit. It offers new perspectives on the movement of texts and ideas across genres and cultures, the formation and reception of poetic personae, and the place of illustration in cross-cultural, textual exchange.

Using methods from book history and print culture studies, Annotation in Eighteenth-Century Poetry explores the functions that annotation performed on and through the printed page. Studying the relation of notes to poetry and the evolving layout of the book, this collection extends to recent inquiries into the rise of literature as a discipline.

This book explores the Erie Railway's contributions to nineteenth-century visual culture by promoting scenic thinking in which closely viewed scenes and deep prospects became the basis for engaging landscapes and their representations. Erie guides became commentary on landscape, with images and texts as annotations on the production of culture.

Drawing on the methods of textual and reception studies, book history, print culture research, and visual culture, this interdisciplinary study of James Thomson's The Seasons (1730) understands the text as marketable commodity and symbolic capital which throughout its extended affective presence in the marketplace for printed literary editions shaped reading habits. At the same time, through the addition of paratexts such as memoirs of Thomson, notes, and illustrations, it was recast by changing readerships, consumer fashions, and ideologies of culture. The book investigates the poem's cultural afterlife by charting the prominent place it occupied in the visual cultures of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. While the emphasis of the chapters is on printed visual culture in the form of book illustrations, the book also features discussions of paintings and other visual media such as furniture prints. Reading illustrations of iconographic moments from The Seasons as paratextual, interpretive commentaries that reflect multifarious reading practices as well as mentalities, the chapters contextualise the editions in light of their production and interpretive inscription. They introduce these editions' publishers and designers who conceived visual translations of the text, as well as the engravers who rendered these designs in the form of the engraving plate from which the illustration could then be printed. Where relevant, the chapters introduce non-British illustrated editions to demonstrate in which ways foreign booksellers were conscious of British editions of The Seasons and negotiated their illustrative models in the sets of engraved plates they commissioned for their volumes.

Striving to develop interdisciplinary dialogue, the essays in this work explore children's and young adult reading through the theoretical lens of "mediation." They interrogate how values and assumptions about the effects of reading underpin reading practices, facilitation of reading and the study of reading, literature and print culture.