Comparative Print Culture

Drawing on comparative literary studies, postcolonial book history, and multiple, literary, and alternative modernities, this collection approaches the study of alternative literary modernities from the perspective ofcomparative print culture. The term comparative print culture designates a wide range of scholarly practices that discover, examine, document, and/or historicize various printed materials and their reproduction, circulation, and uses across genres, languages, media, and technologies, all within a comparative orientation. This book explores alternative literary modernities mostly by highlighting the distinct ways in which literary and cultural print modernities outside Europe evince the repurposing of European systems and cultures of print and further deconstruct their perceived universality.

This collection of essays illustrates various pressures and concerns—both practical and theoretical—related to the study of print culture. Procedural difficulties range from doubts about the reliability of digitized resources to concerns with the limiting parameters of 'national' book history.

This book contributes significantly to book, image and media studies from an interdisciplinary, comparative point of view. Its broad perspective spans medieval manuscripts to e-readers. Inventive methodology offers numerous insights into visual, manuscript and print culture: material objects relate to meaning and reading processes; images and texts are examined in varied associations; the symbolic, representational and cultural agency of books and prints is brought forward. An introduction substantiates methods and approaches, ten chapters follow along media lines: from manuscripts to prints, printed books, and e-readers. Eleven contributors from six countries challenge the idea of a unified field, revealing the role of books and prints in transformation and circulation between varying cultural trends, ‘high’ and ‘low’. Mostly Europe-based, the collection offers book and print professionals, academics and graduates, models for future research, imaginatively combining material culture with archival data, cultural and reading theories with historical patterns.

This timely volume focuses on the period of decolonization and the Cold War as the backdrop to the emergence of new and diverse literary aesthetics that accompanied anti-imperialist commitments and Afro-Asian solidarity. Competing internationalist frameworks produced a flurry of writings that made Asian, African and other world literatures visible to each other for the first time. The book’s essays examine a host of print culture formats (magazines, newspapers, manifestos, conference proceedings, ephemera, etc.) and modes of cultural mediation and transnational exchange that enabled the construction of a variously inflected Third-World culture which played a determining role throughout the Cold War. The essays in this collection focus on locations as diverse as Morocco, Tunisia, South Asia, China, Spain, and Italy, and on texts in Arabic, English, French, Hindi, Italian, and Spanish. In doing so, they highlight the combination of local debates and struggles, and internationalist networks and aspirations that found expression in essays, novels, travelogues, translations, reviews, reportages and other literary forms. With its comparative study of print cultures with a focus on decolonization and the Cold War, the volume makes a major contribution both to studies of postcolonial literary and print cultures, and to cultural Cold War studies in multilingual and non-Western contexts, and will be of interest to historians and literary scholars alike.

Winner, 2018 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures, Modern Language Association Winner, 2018 German Studies Association DAAD Book Prize in Germanistik and Cultural Studies. From the current vantage point of the transformation of books and libraries, B. Venkat Mani presents a historical account of world literature. By locating translation, publication, and circulation along routes of “bibliomigrancy”—the physical and virtual movement of books—Mani narrates how world literature is coded and recoded as literary works find new homes on faraway bookshelves. Mani argues that the proliferation of world literature in a society is the function of a nation’s relationship with print culture—a Faustian pact with books. Moving from early Orientalist collections, to the Nazi magazine Weltliteratur, to the European Digital Library, Mani reveals the political foundations for a history of world literature that is at once a philosophical ideal, a process of exchange, a mode of reading, and a system of classification. Shifting current scholarship’s focus from the academic to the general reader, from the university to the public sphere, Recoding World Literature argues that world literature is culturally determined, historically conditioned, and politically charged.

This essay collection explores the cultural functions the printed book performs in the digital age. It examines how the use of and attitude toward the book form have changed in light of the digital transformation of American media culture. Situated at the crossroads of American studies, literary studies, book studies, and media studies, these essays show that a sustained focus on the medial and material formats of literary communication significantly expands our accustomed ways of doing cultural studies. Addressing the changing roles of authors, publishers, and readers while covering multiple bookish formats such as artists’ books, bestselling novels, experimental fiction, and zines, this interdisciplinary volume introduces readers to current transatlantic conversations on the history and future of the printed book.

This timely volume takes stock of the discipline of comparative literature and its theory and practice from a Canadian perspective. It engages with the most pressing critical issues at the intersection of comparative literature and other areas of inquiry in the context of scholarship, pedagogy and academic publishing: bilingualism and multilingualism, Indigeneity, multiple canons (literary and other), the relationship between print culture and other media, the development of information studies, concerted efforts in digitization, and the future of the production and dissemination of knowledge. The authors offer an analysis of the current state of Canadian comparative literature, with a dual focus on the issues of multilingualism in Canada’s sociopolitical and cultural context and Canada’s geographical location within the Americas. It also discusses ways in which contemporary technology is influencing the way that Canadian literature is taught, produced, and disseminated, and how this affects its readings.

Representing the public sphere : the new journalism and its historians / Mark Hampton Staging the public sphere : magazine dialogism and the prosthetics of authorship at the turn of the twentieth century / Ann Ardis Transatlantic print culture : the Anglo-American feminist press and emerging "modernities" / Lucy Delap and Maria DiCenzo Feminist things / Barbara Green Philanthropy and transatlantic print culture / Francesca Sawaya John O'London's weekly and the modern author / Patrick Collier "Women are news" : British women's magazines, 1919-1939 / Fiona Hackney Christopher Morley's Kitty Foyle : (em)bedded in print / Margaret D. Stetz Journalism and modernism, continued : the case of W.T. Stead / Laurel Brake Journalism, modernity, and the globe-trotting girl reporter / Jean Marie Lutes The fine art of cheap print : turn-of-the-century American little magazines / Kirsten MacLeod The newspaper response to Tender buttons, and what it might mean / Leonard Diepeveen Modernist periodicals and pedagogy : an experiment in collaboration / Suzanne W. Churchill.

The studies presented in the collected volume Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies— edited by Steven Totosy de Zepetnek and Louise O. Vasvari—are intended as an addition to scholarship in (comparative) cultural studies. More specifically, the articles represent scholarship about Central and East European culture with special attention to Hungarian culture, literature, cinema, new media, and other areas of cultural expression. On the landscape of scholarship in Central and East Europe (including Hungary), cultural studies has acquired at best spotty interest and studies in the volume aim at forging interest in the field. The volume's articles are in five parts: part one, "History Theory and Methodology of Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies," include studies on the prehistory of multicultural and multilingual Central Europe, where vernacular literatures were first institutionalized for developing a sense of national identity. Part two, "Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies and Literature and Culture" is about the re-evaluation of canonical works, as well as Jewish studies which has been explored inadequately in Central European scholarship. Part three, "Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies and Other Arts," includes articles on race, jazz, operetta, and art, fin-de-siecle architecture, communist-era female fashion, and cinema. In part four, "Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies and Gender," articles are about aspects of gender and sex(uality) with examples from fin-de-siecle transvestism, current media depictions of heterodox sexualities, and gendered language in the workplace. The volume's last section, part five, "Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies of Contemporary Hungary," includes articles about post-1989 issues of race and ethnic relations, citizenship and public life, and new media.