From The history of a book to a "History of the book"

Representations

Volumn 108, Issue , 2009, Pages 120-138

  Price, Leah ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 70350389956     PISSN: 07346018     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rep.2009.108.1.120     Document Type: Article

References (52)

1. See Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London, 2005)
2. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC, 2003)
3. Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton, 2007), 74-75
4. The article dates to 1991; I owe the reference to Richard Biernacki, "Method and Metaphor After the New Cultural History," in Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, ed. Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Avery Hunt (Berkeley, 1999), 74
5. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY, 1981), 297
6. On the place of smell in book history, see Sean Latham and Robert Scholes, "The Rise of Periodical Studies," PMLA 121 (2006): 526
7. Lorraine Daston, "Taking Note(s)," ISIS: Journal of the History of Science in Society 95, no. 3 (2004): 444
8. Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall, "The Book in Africa," Current Writing 13, no. 2 (2001): 1-8
9. Peter McDonald, "Ideas of the Book and Histories of Literature: After Theory?" PMLA 121 (2006): 222-23
10. As Matthew Brown points out, the one category of object that scholars of material culture shy away from is the book. Even their successors, "thing theorists" like Bill Brown, ask how books represent things, not how books are things. Matthew Brown, "Books, Things, Mary Rowlandson, Us" (invited talk, Harvard Humanities Center, 2007)
11. See Ann Blair, "Note Taking as an Art of Transmission," Critical Inquiry 31, no. 1 (2004): 85-107
12. Ann Blair and Peter Stallybrass, Mediating Information, 1450-1800: Mediating Enlightenment, Past and Present (unpublished ms.)
13. Paul Duguid, The Quality of Information: High-Tech Supply and Low-Tech Command (2007)
14. http://www.parc.com/event/536/quality-of-information.html
15. William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge, 2004)
16. Bradin Cormack and Carla Mazzio, Book Use, Book Theory, 1500-1700 (Chicago, 2005)
17. Charles Johnstone, Chrysal (1760-1765), ed. Malcolm J. Bosse (New York, 1979), x-xi
18. Christina Lupton, "The Knowing Book: Authors, It-Narratives, and Objectification in the Eighteenth Century," Novel 39 (2006): 412
19. Christopher Flint, "Speaking Objects: The Circulation of Stories in Eighteenth-Century Prose Fiction," PMLA 113, no. 2 (1998): 212
20. Power of the Press, 39, quoted in Aileen Fyfe, Science and Salvation: Evangelical Popular Science Publishing in Victorian Britain (Chicago, 2004), 40
21. "Cheap Books," Christian Spectator (July 1846): 146, quoted in Fyfe, Science and Salvation, 159
22. History of a Bible (Ballston Spa, NY, 1811), 1
23. George Etell Sargent, The Story of a Pocket Bible (London, 1859?)
24. Leslie Howsam, Cheap Bibles: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the British and Foreign Bible Society (Cambridge, 1991)
25. John Plotz, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton, 2008)
26. Jay Fliegelman, Belongings: Dramas of American Book Ownership, 1660-1860 (unpublished ms.)
27. "The History of an Old Pocket Bible," Cottage Magazine; or, Plain Christian's Library (March-Dec. 1812): 129
28. The History of a Religious Tract Supposed to Be Related by Itself (London, 1806), 1
29. "The Life and Adventures of a Number of Godey's Lady's Book. Addressed Particularly to Borrowers, Having Been Taken Down in Short-Hand from a Narration Made by Itself, When the Unfortunate Creature Was in a Dilapidated State, from the Treatment Received at the Hands of Cruel Oppressors," Godey's Magazine (November 1855): 425. Thanks to Ellen Garvey for this reference
30. Annie Carey, The History of a Book (London, 1873), 141
31. "Adventures of a Quire of Paper," London Magazine (Aug.-Oct. 1779): 449
32. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, ed. A. S. Byatt (Harmondsworth, 2003), 400
33. Boston Society for the Religious and Moral Improvement of Seamen, The Adventures of a Bible (Boston, 1813), 6
34. The it-narrative might then help explain George Levine's argument (building on Alexander Welsh's similar reading of Scott) that "it is one of the curious facts about the most virtuous heroes and heroines of nineteenth-century English realist fiction that they are inefficacious, inactive people. Their fullest energies are expended only (if at all) in response to external threat, in the preservation of familial and communal ties." George Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (Chicago, 1981), 33
35. See Jonathan Lamb, "Modern Metamorphoses and Disgraceful Tales," Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 158
36. Lynn M. Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore, 2006)
37. Michael Gamer, "Waverley and the Object of Literary History" (forthcoming)
38. and Paul Collins, "You and Your Dumb Friends," Believer (March 2004)
39. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, ed. Jeremy Tambling, (New York, 1996), 90
40. Sharon Marcus, "The Profession of the Author: Abstraction, Advertising, and Jane Eyre," PMLA 110, no. 2 (1995): 209
41. Robert Darnton, "What Is the History of Books?" in The Book History Reader, ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (London, 2002)
42. Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker, "A New Model for the Study of the Book," in A Potencie of Life: Books in Society, ed. Nicolas Barker (London, 1993), 12, 15
43. Roger Chartier, The Order of Books (Cambridge, 1994), 7
44. Arjun Appadurai, "Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value," in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge, 1986), 5
45. See also Aileen Fyfe's argument that the evangelical press praised tracts for their ability to reach places where middle-class bodies could not safely venture. Aileen Fyfe, Science and Salvation, 29
46. Harlan Page Beach, The Cross in the Land of the Trident, or, India from a Missionary Point of View (London, 1896), 104
47. Thomas Street Millington, Straight to the Mark (London, 1883), 52
48. Report of the Committee, 1880, quoted in Samuel G. Green, The Story of the Religious Tract Society for One Hundred Years (London, 1899)
49. Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775-1800 (Cambridge, MA, 1979)
50. Cathy Davidson, "The Life and Times of Charlotte Temple: The Biography of a Book," in Reading in America: Literature and Social History, ed. Cathy Davidson (Baltimore, 1989)
51. Not that this metaphor is confined to books in particular: Witness Igor Kopytoff's essay "The Cultural Biography of Things," in Appadurai, Social Life of Things. For the longer history of the "talking book," see Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York, 1988), 152-69
52. William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia, 2008), 17