British Literature and Print Culture

The complexity of print culture in Britain between the seventeenth and nineteenth century is investigated in these wide-ranging articles.

The complexity of print culture in Britain between the seventeenth and nineteenth century is investigated in these wide-ranging articles.

The essays collected here offer examinations of bibliographical matters, publishing practices, the illustration of texts in a variety of engraved media, little studied print culture genres, the critical and editorial fortunes of individual works, and the significance of the complex interrelationships that authors entertained with booksellers, publishers, and designers. They investigate how all these relationships affected the production of print commodities and how all the agents involved in the making of books contributed to the cultural literacy of readers and the formation of a canon of literary texts. Specific topics include a bibliographical study of Aphra Behn'sOroonoko and its editions from its first publication to the present day; the illustrations of John Bunyan'sPilgrim's Progress and the ways in which the interpretive matrices of book illustration conditioned the afterlife and reception of Bunyan's work; the almanac and the subscription edition; publishing history, collecting, reading, and textual editing, especially of Robert Burns's poems and James Thomson'sThe Seasons; the "printing for the author" practice; the illustrated and material existence of Sir Walter Scott's Waverley novels, and the Victorian periodicalThe Athenaeum.

Sandro Jung is Research Professor of Early Modern British Literature and Director of the Centre for the Study of Text and Print Culture at Ghent University.

Contributors: Gerard Carruthers, Nathalie Collé-Bak, Marysa Demoor, Alan Downie, Peter Garside, Sandro Jung, Brian Maidment, Laura L. Runge.

Introduction - Sandro Jung
Tracing a Genealogy ofOroonoko Editions, 1688-2002 - Laura Runge
The Pilgrim's Progress, Print Culture and the Dissenting Tradition - Nathalie Colle-Bak
Printing for the Author in the Long Eighteenth Century - Alan Downie
Robert Burns's InterleavedScots Musical Museum: A Case-Study in the Vagaries of Editors and Owners - Gerard Carruthers
Packaging, Design and Colour: From Fine-Printed to Small-Format Editions of Thomson'sThe Seasons, 1793-1802 - Sandro Jung
Print Illustrations and the Cultural Materialism of Scott'sWaverley Novels - Peter Garside
Beyond Usefulness and Ephemerality: The Discursive Almanac, 1828-60 - Brian Maidment
The Last Years of a Victorian Monument: TheAthenaeum after Maccoll - Marysa Demoor