The Typewriter Century: A Cultural History of Writing Practices

The Typewriter Century: A Cultural History of Writing Practices

by Martyn Lyons
The Typewriter Century: A Cultural History of Writing Practices

The Typewriter Century: A Cultural History of Writing Practices

by Martyn Lyons

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Overview

This book captures the intensity of the relationship between writers and their typewriters from the 1880s, when the machine was first commercialized, to the 1980s, when word-processing superseded it. Drawing on examples from the United States, Britain, Europe, and Australia, The Typewriter Century focuses on "celebrity writers," including Henry James, Jack Kerouac, Agatha Christie, Georges Simenon, and Erle Stanley Gardner, who wrote prolifically and mechanically, developing routines in which typing, handwriting, and dictation were each allotted important functions.

The typewriter de-personalized the text; the office typewriter bureaucratized it. At the same time, some authors found a new and disturbing distance between themselves and their compositions while others believed the typewriter facilitated spontaneous and automatic typing. The Typewriter Century provides a cultural history of the typewriter, outlining the ways in which it can be considered an agent of change as well as demonstrating how it influenced all writers, canonical and otherwise.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781487525736
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Publication date: 02/02/2021
Series: Studies in Book and Print Culture
Pages: 276
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.75(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Martyn Lyons is an emeritus professor of History & European Studies at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: The Typewriter as an Agent of Change?
2. The Birth of the Typosphere
3. Modernity and the Typewriter Girl
4. The Modernist Typewriter
5. The Distancing Effect: The Hand, the Eye, the Voice
6. The Romantic Typewriter
7. Manuscript and Typescript
8. Georges Simenon: The Man in the Glass Cage
9. Erle Stanley Gardner: The Fiction Factory
10. Domesticating the Typewriter
11. The End of the Typewriter Century and Post-Digital Nostalgia

Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Lisa Kuitert

"One has to admit that the typewriter can be traced in every single country with different sources everywhere. Provoking the reader's mindset, this book is informative, well written, and original. Students in literature, communication studies, media studies, and book studies will appreciate this book a lot — for the typewriter is an anomaly to them."

Shafquat Towheed

"The Typewriter Century convincingly brings together currently segregated strands of research on print technology, modernist style in terms of formalist literary criticism, and authorship informed by the rise of cultural studies. Martyn Lyons has a longstanding reputation in the history of reading and writing practices, and his case studies are supported with meticulous archival research."

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