Abstract
This introduction highlights the methods and practices that can be generatively applied to a global history of the book. Displacing the nation as a primary category of reference, it argues that a global, rather than simply national, approach can enrich our understanding of the circulation of print cultures across the world. Introducing eleven essays that draw on the intellectual resources of literary studies, history, area studies, and media and communication studies, it suggests that a global history of the book pays attention to multifarious instances of interaction and connection. It provides a critical mediation of how we might read the mobile book in global perspective, aware that the channels through which books travel have always been surprising, if also fragile and uneven.
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Notes
- 1.
Seth Lerer, ‘Epilogue: Falling Asleep Over the History of the Book’, PMLA, 21:1 (2006), p. 232.
- 2.
Lerer, ‘Falling Asleep’, p. 232. Cotton’s personal collections were transferred to the England in 1701 for ‘Publick Use and Advantage’. See: http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/findhelprestype/manuscripts/cottonmss/cottonmss.html.
- 3.
- 4.
The 1980 Statement on the History of the Book quoted in Michael F. Suarez, ‘Historiographical Problems and Possibilities in Book History and National Histories of the Book’, Studies in Bibliography, 56 (2003–2004), p. 149.
- 5.
Martyn Lyons, ‘National Histories of the Book in a Transnational Age’, Mémoires du Livre/Studies in Book Culture, 7:2 (2016); Lyons and John Arnold (eds.), A History of the Book in Australia, 1891–1945: A National Culture in a Colonised Market (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2001). See also Sydney Shep, ‘Books without Borders: The Transnational Turn in Book History’, in Books Without Borders: Volume 1: The Cross-National Dimension in Print Culture, eds. Robert Fraser and Mary Hammond (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 13–37; Sydney Shep, ‘Books in Global Perspective’, in The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book, ed. Leslie Howsam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 53–70; Swapan Chakravorty and Abhijit Gupta (eds.), New Word Order: Transnational Themes in Book History (Delhi: Worldview, 2011).
- 6.
‘The Global History of the Book (1780–present)’ was held at University of Oxford on 4 and 5 December 2014, organised by the editors with Dominic Davies, Erica Lombard, and Benjamin Mountford. Five of the essays in this volume were presented at the conference. It was followed by a second event, ‘Writers and Readers: Books that shaped and subverted the British Empire’ organised by Marilyn Lake on 8 and 9 May 2015 at the University of Melbourne, at which two of the essays in this volume were presented.
- 7.
The difference in approach compared to the encyclopaedic scope of publications such as Michael F. Suarez and H. R. Woudhuysen’s edited volume The Book: A Global History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) will be clear to readers. Nor have we covered all regions comprehensively; we hope the notable gaps of West and East Africa are assuaged by Caroline Davis and David Johnson’s The Book in Africa: Critical Debates (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
- 8.
To our surprise, and contrary to developments elsewhere in the field, digital research tools have relatively little presence in the essays.
- 9.
Daniel T. Rodgers, ‘Cultures in Motion: An Introduction’ in Cultures in Motion, eds. Daniel T. Rodgers, Bhavani Raman and Helmut Reimitz (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 1; Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
- 10.
Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in the Age of World Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), pp. 25–26.
- 11.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1982); Walkowitz, Born Translated, p. 27. The phrase ‘imagined concurrence of action’ is Walkowitz’s.
- 12.
Elleke Boehmer, Indian Arrivals, 1870–1915: Networks of British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 14–15.
- 13.
Walkowitz, Born Translated. For a nineteenth century perspective on this, see Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), and for the twentieth century, Alexander Cook (ed.), Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
- 14.
See among others, Robert Fraser and Mary Hammond (eds.), Books Without Borders: Two Volumes (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008); Hester Blum (ed.), Turns of Event: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies in Motion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
- 15.
Sarah Ogilvie, Words of the World: A Global History of the Oxford English Dictionary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
- 16.
Martine van Ittersum and Jaap Jacobs, ‘Are We All Global Historians Now? An Interview with David Armitage’, Itinerario, 36 (2012), p. 17.
- 17.
W. B. Yeats, Prefaces and Introductions: Uncollected Prefaces and Introductions by Yeats to Works by Other Authors and to Anthologies Edited by Yeats, ed. William H. O’Donnell (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 147.
- 18.
Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 116.
- 19.
Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
- 20.
Patrick Collier and James J. Connolly, ‘Introduction’, in Print Culture Histories Beyond the Metropolis, eds. James J. Connolly, Patrick Collier, Frank Felsenstein, Kenneth R. Hall and Robert G. Hall (Toronto; Buffalo; London: University of Toronto Press, 2016), p. 5.
- 21.
Ibid., p. 12.
- 22.
Emily S. Rosenberg, ‘Introduction’, in A World Connecting, 1870–1945, ed. Emily S. Rosenberg (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 4.
- 23.
Simon J. Potter and Jonathan Saha, ‘Global History, Imperial History and Connected Histories of Empire’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 16:1 (2015).
- 24.
Antoinette Burton and Tony Ballantyne, Empires and the Reach of the Global, 1870–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 20.
- 25.
Potter and Saha, ‘Global History’; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia’, Modern Asian Studies, 31:3 (July, 1997), p. 762; Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Considerations of Imperial Comparisons’, in Empire Speaks Out: Languages of Rationalization and Self-Description in the Russian Empire, eds. Ilya Gerasimov, Jan Kusber and Alexander Semyonov (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 33–58; Laura Doyle, ‘Afterword: Modernist Studies and Inter-imperiality in the Long Durée’ in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernism, eds. Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 669–696.
- 26.
Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 91–92.
- 27.
Leah Price, ‘Introduction: Reading Matter’, PMLA, 21:1 (2006), p. 14.
- 28.
Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr, ‘Introduction. The Spine of Empire? Books and the Making of an Imperial Commons’, in Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons, eds. Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), p. 1. See also John B. Thompson, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge; Malden, MA.: Polity, 2010), pp. 187–222.
- 29.
The phenomena of non-reading is hardly exclusive to Menzies; research conducted for the World Book Day in 2009 showed that vast numbers of contemporary readers falsely claimed to have read canonical works to impress others. For more on non-reading of this kind, see Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (London: Bloomsbury, 2007).
- 30.
See Corinne Sandwith, World of Letters: Reading Communities and Cultural Debates in Early Apartheid South Africa (Durban: University of Kwazulu-Natal Press, 2014); Karin Barber (ed.), Readings in African Popular Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Stephanie Newell, West African Literatures: Ways of Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Stephanie Newell, The Power to Name: A History of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa (Athens, OH.: Ohio University Press, 2013).
- 31.
Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
- 32.
The Heinemann African Writers Series was established in 1962. See James Currey, Africa Writes Back: The African Writers Series and the Launch of African literature (Oxford: James Currey, 2008).
- 33.
Walkowitz, Born Translated, pp. 1–48.
- 34.
Lydia H. Liu, ‘Introduction’ in Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations, ed. Lydia H. Liu (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 1–12; Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan, p. 15.
- 35.
Price, ‘Reading Matter’, p. 11.
- 36.
D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) p. 28.
- 37.
Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007).
- 38.
Thompson, Merchants of Culture, p. 187.
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Boehmer, E., Kunstmann, R., Mukhopadhyay, P., Rogers, A. (2017). Introduction. In: Boehmer, E., Kunstmann, R., Mukhopadhyay, P., Rogers, A. (eds) The Global Histories of Books. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51334-8_1
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