The Perils of Print Culture

the long version

"This stimulating collection of essays illustrates various pressures and concerns - both practical and theoretical - related to research in the fast-developing terrain of print culture studies. As the editors Jason McElligott and Eve Patten suggest in an engaging and provocative introduction to the volume, researchers in diverse aspects of this field regularly confront similar procedural or methodological difficulties in their work: these range from doubts about the reliability of digitized resources and concerns with the limiting parameters of 'national' book history to overall skepticism about academic definitions of what 'print culture' means in the first place. In the essays assembled here, several leading print culture experts, including Leslie Howsam, James Raven, David Finkelstein and Toby Barnard, join with a number of emerging scholars and historians of print culture to address such 'perils', in a series of lively and illuminating 'case-study' contributions to the subject"--