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6 results

  • Chapter 7 - The Rise and Fall of the English-Language Literary Novel since World War II

  • Edited by Colleen Lye, University of California, Berkeley, Christopher Nealon
  • Book:
    After Marx
    Published online:
    12 March 2022
    Print publication:
    17 March 2022, pp 116-130

  • Summary

    This chapter outlines the rise and (partial) fall of the mainstream English-language literary novel since WWII. The heights of success of the literary novel required that readers have leisure, focus, and access to public institutions that support literary study and activity. After WWII, literary work was supported by the surge in university enrollments built upon the postwar period’s remarkable economic dynamism, which afforded state-supported higher education and high rates of secure employment. In more recent years, however, austerity governments increasingly defund humanities education and literary arts programming. Students and aspiring writers, indebted and anxious about pathways to employment, are induced to avoid literary study and work, to be risk-averse and market-facing; and people simply do not feel compelled to spend what little they have for entertainment on expensive books. The avowedly literary branch of the mainstream industry has been contracting for these reasons, while other forms of reading and writing cultures (for instance, self-publishing and texts designed for smartphones) have emerged into a more dominant position.

  • Chapter 5 - Robert Roberts’s The House Servant’s Directory and the Performance of Stability in African American Print, 1800–1830

  • from Part II - Movement and Mobility in African American Literature
  • Edited by Jasmine Nichole Cobb, Duke University, North Carolina
  • Book:
    African American Literature in Transition, 1800–1830
    Published online:
    11 March 2021
    Print publication:
    13 May 2021, pp 119-145

  • Summary

    This chapter explores issues of black mobility by considering the circulation of Robert Roberts’s 1827 book, The House Servant’s Directory: or, A Monitor for Private Families. The House Servant’s Directory holds an important place in book history as one of the earliest known commercially produced books written by a formerly enslaved African American man. Initially, the book received printings in both New York and Boston and was popular enough to warrant two subsequent editions. However, the popular circulation of The House Servant’s Directory exceeded the “circulation” of its indentured author, as his mobility was limited by restrictions on people of African descent. And while the story of David Walker’s broad circulation of his 1829 Appeal fits well into narratives about Black mobility and fugitivity, the early African American print sphere is more often marked by less successful efforts at circulation.

  • 33 - Book reviewing

  • from II - LITERATURE AND THE CULTURE OF LETTERS
  • Edited by Michael F. Suarez, SJ, University of Virginia, Michael L. Turner, Bodleian Library, Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
    Published online:
    28 September 2010
    Print publication:
    29 October 2009, pp 631-648

  • Summary

    The establishment and rapid spread of general book reviewing in the second half of the eighteenth century clearly altered the balance of book publishing, introducing a new factor into the marketing and reading of books. In the Critical Review's striking phrase, reviewing 'inclosed what was once a common field', and, whether they liked or loathed it, fought it or exploited it, booksellers, authors and readers came to expect this further factor in the publishing relationship. Advertising and the sight of the physical volumes themselves were no longer necessarily the primary means of initial acquaintance with books. Before ever reading booksellers' advertisements in newspapers or books, before encountering title pages, prefaces and other physical aspects of books in shops or libraries, consumers might well already have seen, and sometimes paid for, the opinions of reviewers. Bookselling has never been the same.

  • 13 - London and the central sites of the English book trade

  • from I - LONDON AND THE ‘COUNTRY’
  • Edited by Michael F. Suarez, SJ, University of Virginia, Michael L. Turner, Bodleian Library, Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
    Published online:
    28 September 2010
    Print publication:
    29 October 2009, pp 291-308

  • Summary

    Mapping the location of printers, booksellers and allied businesses deepens our understanding of the commercial and cultural orientation of the book trade between the late seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries. As this chapter seeks to demonstrate, the business of publishing and bookselling, characterized by increasing diversity and a steady expansion of production, was closely allied to the transformation of London during this period. With some important exceptions, seventeenth-century London printers continued to congregate in two broad areas of activity, one outside the City focused on Smithfield, and the other stretching broadly southwards from the cathedral to Paul's Wharf and London Bridge. Both old and new London venues sustained the advance of the eighteenth-century book trade. Several ancient sites had supported book-traders, some under the same distinctive trade sign, for generations stretching back before the Civil War, but recent research also reveals the recurrent reuse of many print and book shops by different trades.

  • 2 - The illustration revolution

  • Edited by David McKitterick, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
    Published online:
    28 March 2010
    Print publication:
    05 March 2009, pp 117-143

  • Summary

    The nineteenth century brought illustrated books and periodicals to large sectors of the British population for the first time. The first serious efforts to bring large numbers of illustrated publications within the pockets of ordinary readers were made in Britain in the 1830s with the rise of pictorial journals, particularly the Penny Magazine. The measure of the progress of illustration in nineteenth-century Britain is provided by pictures in popular periodicals. The astonishing growth of illustration in nineteenth-century periodicals was echoed in some categories of book publishing, though less dramatically. In the late eighteenth century two developments paved the way for the rapid increase in illustrative material. They are Thomas Bewick's refinements to the process of producing relief prints from wood, and Alois Senefelder's invention of the planographic process of lithography in Germany in 1798/9. Several approaches were adopted for the production of photographic illustrations in books before the development of photomechanical relief blocks in the closing decades of the century.

  • 16 - Changes in the world of publishing

  • from Part III - Histories: Writing in the New Movements
  • Edited by James Chandler
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature
    Published online:
    28 May 2009
    Print publication:
    05 March 2009, pp 377-402

  • Summary

    The term 'publishing', used to denote a discrete and stable commercial practice, dates from the first quarter of the nineteenth century. The years of Romanticism saw the English book trade change from a craft to something that might plausibly be called an industry. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century the British book trade had enjoyed a long period of stability. A considerable proportion of the increase in publishing is accounted for by the expansion of commercial novel publishing. Publishing had always been concentrated in London, indeed, it was virtually a metropolitan monopoly until the mid-eighteenth century. As some firms concentrated on publishing, so others saw new opportunities in the old enterprises of retailing and wholesaling. At the end of the eighteenth century the law, practices and constitution of the book trade had already changed profoundly, and its market had expanded enormously. Printing was undergoing its own industrial revolution.