The Global Histories of Books: Methods and Practices

by Elleke Boehmer (Editor), Rouven Kunstmann (Editor), Priyasha Mukhopadhyay (Editor), Asha Rogers (Editor)

Overview

This book is an edited volume of essays that showcases how books played a crucial role in making and materialising histories of travel, scientific exchanges, translation, and global markets from the late-eighteenth century to the present. While existing book historical practice is overly dependent on models of the local and the national, we suggest that approaching the book as a cross-region, travelling – and therefore global- object offers new approaches and methodologies for a study in global perspective. By thus studying the book in its transnational and inter-imperial, textual, inter-textual and material dimensions, this collection will highlight its key role in making possible a global imagination, shaped by networks of print material, readers, publishers and translators.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783319513348
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	07/26/2017
Series:	New Directions in Book History
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	334
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English, in the English Faculty at the University of Oxford, UK, and Director of TORCH. Her most recent monograph, Indian Arrivals 1870-1915, won the ESSE 2016 prize for Literature in English. Her novels include Nile Baby (2008), and The Shouting in the Dark (2015, long-listed Barry Ronge-Sunday Times prize).
Rouven Kunstmann is a doctoral researcher in History at the University of Oxford, UK. He focuses on print cultures, nationalism, decolonisation and photography in West Africa as global and local information circulation. His work has been recently published in Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies.
Priyasha Mukhopadhyay is a Junior Fellow at the Society of Fellows, Harvard University, USA. Her research interests include the history of the colonial and postcolonial book, South Asian literatures, and theories of the archive. 
Asha Rogers is Lecturer in Contemporary Postcolonial Literature at the School of English, Drama and American&Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her research interests include postcolonial literatures, the Cold War and decolonisation, and the interfaces between state cultural institutions and literature.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction.- SECTION ONE: COLONIAL NETWORKS.- Chapter 2. London’s Geographic Knowledge Network and the Anson Account (1748) - Katherine Parker.-  Chapter 3. The Other Empire: Australian Books and American Publishers in the late nineteenth century- David Carter.- Chapter 4. Reading by Chance in a World of Wandering Texts - Alexander Bubb.- SECTION TWO: GLOBAL GENRES.- Chapter 5. ‘Read! Learn!’: Globalisation and (G)localisation in Caribbean Textbook Publishing - Gail Low.- Chapter 6. Governing by the Book: Mediterranean Travel and Sanitary Prophylaxis in the Nineteenth-Century - Riccardo Liberatore.- Chapter 7. The Circle of Knowledge: Radical Commensurability and the Deaf Textbook - Hansun Hsiung.- SECTION THREE: READING RELATIONSHIPS.- Chapter 8. ‘Bringing Spring to Sahbai’s Rose-Garden’: Persian Printing in North India after 1857 - Zahra Shah.- Chapter 9. Reading The Discovery of India in the Library of an Australian Prime Minister - Sybil Nolan.- SECTION FOUR: CULTURAL TRANSLATION.- Chapter 10. Bustānī’s Iliad and Imperialism in the Middle East - Evelyn Richardson.- Chapter 11. ‘The Narcissism of Small Differences’: Plagiarism in South African Letters - Kate Highman.- Chapter 12. The Fear of Solitude: How Marketing Makes Real Magic - Ben Holgate.- Afterword - Elleke Boehmer.- 

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“In this smart, wide-ranging study of texts on the move, the global history of the book becomes a counter-history of the nation. Rather than pitting one against the other, contributors show how entangled these spheres are – and how key print culture is to illuminating points of convergence and divergence. Moving skillfully between dog-eared volumes and the booksellers, readers and marketplaces that made them, this collection brims with insights about the lives of books and their role not simply in reflecting global relations but in creating them — with every turn of the page.” (Antoinette M. Burton, Professor of History, University of Illinois, USA, and co-author with Isabel Hofmeyr of “Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire”)

Editorial Reviews

This rich and diverse collection of essays certainly proves a valuable addition to the growing scholarship on the global histories and transnational circulation of books. It also provides professors with fascinating case studies to examine with their students.” (Cécile Cottenet, Comparativ -Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung, Vol. 29 (3), 2019)

From the Publisher