Introduction

Summary

Print-culture studies is a burgeoning field: it is actively fostered by bibliographical societies worldwide; centres for the study of the history of the book and material text have been founded, and several specialist book series on print culture have produced excellent contributions to the field. These series continuously demonstrate the need to revisit existing histories of print and to include alternative narratives that reveal hitherto neglected, often ephemeral print cultures. It is the recovery of these lesser-known print cultures that is essential for the mapping of cultural production in different knowledge economies and a better understanding of the role that print played in the fashioning of literature. Book-historical perspectives have helped scholars to investigate the cultural mechanisms affecting the production, dissemination and consumption of books in print form; as a discipline book history has expanded beyond the traditional focus on the material book to explore the social, cultural, ideological and economic processes underpinning an explosion of print in the eighteenth century. The flood of print matter that fed consumer demand and encouraged the consumption of all kinds of fashionable objects was closely linked with the rapidly developing visual cultures of society, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when innovations in the printing of illustrations contributed to creating a mass-culture of the visual not possible before. Print culture catered to, and shaped, readers' visual imagination, and literary texts were frequently illustrated.