Introduction

Abstract

Introduction SANDRO JUNG AND STEPHEN COLCLOUGH The history of the book no longer focuses exclusively on the form of the codex as material object, replete with a history of its production and social life, on the one hand, and the abstract conception of the book as container of intellectual endeavour, on the other. In fact, the very definition of the book has in recent years come under scrutiny as book-like media such as the tablet and e-reader proliferate and invoke virtually the page-turning actions that characterized a book made from paper and cast into durable format through a binding. Book history, in its most basic sense, is an exclusive denomination, excluding all manner of text objects that do not fulfil the requirements stipulated by definitions of the book, yet at the same time drawing artificial demarcation lines between objects that are inextricably, through their production and marketing in a media economy, related to one another. Imprecise as a sub-discipline of historical study, the history of the book has become complementary to the study of print culture, an equally difficult term to define. Originally conceived as a model to explain the increase in print products, as opposed to what was considered the older text technology of manuscript writing, this scholarly dialectic inherent in ‘print culture’ has in recent years also been transformed into a view that sees print and manuscript culture as co-existing and as cross-fertilizing one another. The conceptually open history of the book, whose practitioners are clearly aware of the artificiality of definitions, as well as the limitations that an emphasis on the printed book entails, embraces a whole range of print objects. It no longer excludes works that are not produced in codex form, and the methodologies for thestudyoftypographictext,thematerialityofpaperandthedesignofillustrations and ornaments can easily be applied to less permanent, single-sheet publications which, although issued singly, were usually gathered together and transformed into miscellanies in codex form by later generations. More generally, then, book history has come to encompass the study of the text technologies that make possible cultural literacy, conveyed through the typographically printed word or through the manuscript that is laboriously realized or casually created through Yearbook of English Studies, 45 (2015), 1–11© Modern Humanities Research Association 2015 The guest editors would like to thank Thomas Van der Goten for his editorial assistance throughout the project, as well as Richard Correll and the MHRA production team for their professional and efficient support. They are also grateful to Andrew Hiscock for commissioning this number of the Yearbook of English Studies and for making sure the production of this volume went smoothly. quick annotation. It is concerned not only with objects but with the subjects producing and handling these objects, as well as the print- and cultural-historical social lives of both. As such, it examines the ways in which various agents in the marketplace for books and other text objects mediate these media’s textually inscribedmateriality.Itinvestigateshowtracesofuseandconsumptionshedlight on the ways in which readers engaged with the physical form and, in addition to reading texts, complemented these narratives’ textual condition by feeding back their thoughts in the tangible medium of ink or pencil annotation (so as to create, for later readers, a more complex text than the one they had initially read). Just as much as the field of book history has experienced a methodological broadening in recent years, so have literary studies increasingly negotiated the vast variety of texts that are traditionally withheld from view through a canon that is too narrowly focused on high-cultural works — those texts that have retained a mention (or more extended discussion) in literary histories. Through the important efforts of feminist historiography, an ever-greater number of works by women authors have been recovered. Alternative canons by workingclass writers of both sexes, on the one hand, and the hacks of Grub Street, on the other, as well as the large number of popular print media that cannot be attributed to individual authors, have complicated existing narratives of the making and reading of literature. Quantitatively speaking, the mass of literary texts produced from the early modern period onwards has never been mapped more comprehensively than...