Abstract
A question less perilous than how to theorise or model book and print culture, or how to redesign its intellectual frameworks, is to ask about practice. How do scholars actually ‘do’ studies in the history and culture of the book when it comes down to working with sources, adopting methodologies and constructing arguments? How do our chosen source materials and methods shape our (mostly unspoken) definitions of ’book culture’ or ‘print culture’? How do scholars use libraries and archives, and how do they think about the provenance of the collections they hold? If book historians make ambitious claims for the central importance of studying ‘print culture’ and ‘the book’, should they not be able to articulate a methodology and approach to research that is shared across the disciplines of our field, and perhaps also across the broad range of places and times in which the book has appeared? And if they cannot succeed in that ambition, is the failure one of practice, or is it something intrinsic to the very concepts of ‘the book’, ‘book history’ and ‘print culture’?
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Notes
For the debate on fixity see the 2002 ‘AHR Forum’: Anthony Grafton, ‘AHR Forum: How Revolutionary was the Print Revolution?’, American Historical Review 107 (February 2002): 84–6.
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, ‘AHR Forum: An Unacknowledged Revolution Revisited’, American Historical Review 107 (February 2002): 87–105.
Adrian Johns, ‘AHR Forum: How to Acknowledge a Revolution’, American Historical Review 107 (February 2002): 106–25.
D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. The Panizzi Lectures, 1985 (London, 1986).
Reprinted in D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge, 1999).
Clifford Geertz, ‘Thick Description: Towards an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, in C. Geertz (ed.), The Interpretation of Cultures (1975),
quoted in David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture (Cambridge, 1989), p. 4.
Leslie Howsam, Old Books & New Histories: An Orientation to Studies in Book & Print Culture (Toronto, 2006); ‘Book History Unbound: Transactions of the Written Word Made Public’, Canadian Journal of History 38 (April 2003): 69–81.
Robert Darnton, ‘What is the History of Books?’ Dædalus 111(3) (1982): 65–83; A McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts;
Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge and Stanford, CA, 1994);
Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge, 1997);
Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton, NJ, 1991);
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London, 1991);
Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge, 1993);
Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Boston, MA, 1993);
David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, The Book History Reader (London, 2002).
Dallas Liddle, The Dynamics of Genre: Journalism and the Practice of Literature in Mid-Victorian Britain (Charlottesville, VA, 2009).
Michèle Lamont, How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment (Cambridge, MA, 2009), p. 70.
Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie 1775–1800 (Cambridge, MA, 1979), pp. 2–3.
Hayden White, The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957–2007 (Baltimore, MD, 2010), p. 321.
Antoinette Burton, Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham, NC, 2006), pp. 6, 9.
Leslie Howsam, Past into Print: The Publishing of History in Britain 1850–1950 (London and Toronto, 2009), p. 40.
Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice, 2nd edn. (London, 2006), pp. 151–2.
Germaine Warkentin, ‘In Search of “The Word of the Other”: Aboriginal Sign Systems and the History of the Book in Canada’, Book History 2 (1999): 1–27.
Adams B. Bodomo, Computer-Mediated Communication for Linguistics and Literacy: Technology and Natural Language Education (Hershey, PA, 2010), p. 201.
James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago, IL, 2000).
William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge, 2004).
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© 2014 Leslie Howsam
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Howsam, L. (2014). The Practice of Book and Print Culture: Sources, Methods, Readings. In: McElligott, J., Patten, E. (eds) The Perils of Print Culture. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137415325_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137415325_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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