Although a product of his time – the literary traditions of Pope, Addison, and Swift; the Toryism and churchmanship of the eighteenth century – Samuel Johnson also transcended it through his own gifts and forceful character. After a difficult early life, marked by melancholy, a troubled relationship with his family, and an early departure from Oxford University, Johnson began to find his way in the 1730s. He married Elizabeth Porter, moved to London, and began to make his mark through work at the Gentleman’s Magazine and works such as the Life of Savage. He achieved renown as an essayist and fame as the compiler of the Dictionary but also suffered from bereavement and continuing financial insecurity. After the award of a government pension in 1762, Johnson’s works have a more relaxed style, and his final major work, the Lives of the Poets, helped to establish this era as the Age of Johnson.

This chapter uses book history and digital humanities approaches to situate e-books’ liminal ‘book but not real book’ status in historic and contemporary contexts. The question of whether digital books deserve full status as ‘books’ – and equality with print – has dogged e-books since their inception. Readers are now negotiating e-book realness on their own terms. Addressing definitions of bookness and long-standing debates on digital materiality, the chapter progresses through aspects of legitimacy to analysis of qualitative data on whether, and why, readers consider e-books real. The complexity of readers’ conceptions of the realness of e-books demonstrates how strands of the metaphor of the book, the bookness of physical books, the realness of electronic texts, and the particularities of paratext and literary status for digital works interweave, setting the stage for subsequent chapters following the reader through stages of discovering, obtaining, reading, retaining, displaying, and (sometimes) loving a digital book.

Shannon and Marshall read London alongside the city of Manchester, and the fictional town of Cranford in their chapter, which takes some of the decade’s industrial novels and examines them through the lens of sustainability. The chapter is mindful that it is in this period that industrialisation and globalisation begin to achieve the capacity that we are now seeking to control as we realise the environmental devastation of their proliferation; and that industrial success is based on a deeply unsustainable exploitation of human and natural resources. The authors argue that though Dickens and Gaskell did not have the language of sustainability that is available to us, nonetheless their work begins to recognise the costs of British trade domination. The picture is complicated by the novelists’ own dependence on the industrialisation of publishing, its increasingly necessary global reach, and the tight deadlines of the serialised novel, on which periodical publications depended.

The scientific community fundamentally requires the conduct of research to meet ethical standards. Bureaucracy and regulation may enforce these requirements, but they ultimately reflect the underlying values of science and the social norms that translate these values into practice. In creating knowledge, scientists must protect research participants, and they are also obliged to treat their data and communications in accordance with honesty, transparency, and a commitment to the benefit of society. We review the history and current state of human participant protection; make a case that many of the changes in standards of data handling and publication reporting over the past ten years themselves have ethical dimensions; and briefly list a number of pending ethics issues in research and publishing that do not as yet have a clear, consensual resolution in the field of psychology.

The chapter explores the ways in which Clare’s sense of personal identity and selfhood is first created, and then fashioned and influenced, by the many differing pressures brought to bear upon it. Such pressures include poetic antecedents, social and economic conditions, literary associations and relationships, as well as the more personal features of an upbringing rooted in the natural world, which is authoritative and confirming, and an internal world, which is increasingly fragile and unstable. The chapter traces these evolutions – from the earliest verse that Clare wrote to the last poems of his asylum years.

This chapter examines the production, circulation, and reception of books in the digital landscape, comprising a complicated entanglement between bricks-and-mortar bookstores and digital technologies that transforms every aspect of the way books are produced, published, distributed, and experienced. The history of the relationship between bookselling, reading devices, publishing and printing platforms, and the shape of the literary marketplace in the digital age reveals elements of the publishing circuit that are examined along with the increasing platformization of cultural production. The digital literary sphere affects authorship and the remuneration authors receive; the increased conflation between publishing and bookselling; the tension between e-books and print, and online versus bricks-and-mortar stores; and the relationship between fan fiction and literary consumption. The literary marketplace in the digital age is one marked by flux, but also the rise of new forms of access and new meaning for books and literature in the digital age.

This chapter focuses attention on covert or unattributable propaganda conducted in India by the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department. Between the outbreak of the Sino-Indian border war in 1962, and the Indian general election of 1967, IRD operations in the subcontinent peaked. At the time, the Indian government welcomed British support in an information war waged against Communist China. However, cooperation between London and New Delhi quickly waned. Britain’s propaganda initiative in India lacked strategic coherence and cut across the grain of local resistance to anti-Soviet material. The British Government found itself running two separate propaganda campaigns in the subcontinent: one openly focused on Communist China; and a second, secret programme, targeting the Soviet Union. Whitehall found it difficult to implement an integrated and effective anti-communist propaganda offensive in India. The chapter also recovers the importance of nonaligned nations in the story of Cold War covert propaganda and reveals that India was never a passive player in the propaganda Cold War.

The radical Right’s initiatives have not been confined to the realm of ideas. Armed with a specific understanding of the deep cultural and social foundations of the liberal hegemonic order, they have diligently embarked on a Gramscian war of position: a patient counter-hegemonic struggle to change the predominant ‘common sense’ and produce ‘organic intellectuals’ who can critique the existing order and provide alternatives to it. We focus on the Right’s often overlooked efforts to capture the traditional institutions of cultural and political domination via academic publishing, universities, and policy institutes. These initiatives seek to create a new legitimacy and acceptability for radical Right ideas, explicitly re-writing intellectual history from a radical conservative perspective and reclaiming it from the academic mainstream. Through new universities and think tanks, their aim is to replace the liberal, woke, managerial, globalist elite with a Right elite, schooled in the critique of managerialism and critical of the over-reach of international institutions and liberal powers and think tanks.

In and of itself, the category of the bestseller presumes neither literary status nor political consensus. As Ruth Miller Elson remarks, “bestselling books… offer clues to the world view of that mythical creature—the average American.” LGBT bestsellers likewise offer clues about the average queer American—and a perspective on dominant trends and themes in queer culture and consumption since the 1970s. This chapter charts the history of the LGBT bestseller alongside a broader history of LGBT culture in the post-Stonewall era. It traces a shift in popular LGBT literature and publishing from separatism to assimilation, from its roots in the independent gay presses of the 1970s through the peak of the AIDS epidemic to the post-AIDS bestsellers popular with both queer and straight readerships. Texts considered include Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), Larry Kramer’s Faggots (1978), Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (1978-2014), Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1999), Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006), and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015).

This chapter introduces the so-called ‘profession of letters’ during Swift’s lifetime: an idealised mode of study that included reading and conversing as much as publishing. Like his friend Alexander Pope, Swift defined his writing against a culture of production dependent on cheap popularity, the machinations of booksellers, and government bribery. Swift took aim against this culture in A Tale of a Tub (1704), which bristles with paratexts parodying standard-issue front matter. Unlike Pope, who implicitly acknowledged his status within the commercial print culture of the early eighteenth century, Swift, this chapter argues, always maintained ambivalence towards the literary marketplace.

This chapter provides a helpful primer to Swift’s relationship with the early eighteenth-century book trade. The first section focuses on the formats, sizes, prices, and lengths of Swift’s works, most of which were first published separately and not in anthologies. The second section examines imprints, in particular those of ‘trade publishers’, and how these imprints could be used as cover for anonymous and risky publications. The third and final section looks at the issue of copyright and how it shaped Swift’s decisions when publishing in London and Dublin. As the chapter shows, Swift showed loyalty to book-trade members who showed loyalty to him, including those in Ireland.

The chapter charts the topography of English imaginative writing in the period leading up the publication of Gulliver’s Travels in 1726. A substantial opening section focuses on works for which Swift’s literary circle were responsible, including works by his fellow Scriblerians as well as Matthew Prior, Joseph Addison, and Richard Steele. The three following sections focus, respectively, on significant publications in prose, poetry, and drama that Swift would have noticed.

This chapter provides an overview of the Irish literary scene during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. There was a growing demand for literature of all kinds and the work of local poets, songwriters, playwrights, and pamphleteers appeared alongside printed material imported from London; local verses and satires circulated widely in manuscript. As a boy, Swift was immersed in this material and in later life he contributed to it. The easy availability of books and pamphlets made Dublin, at least for its better-educated and more affluent citizens, an attractive place to live.