From The History of a Book to a "History of the Book"
Year: 2009
Type: article
Abstract: The ambition of this article is to wrest attention away from the fraction of any book's life cycle spent in the hands of readers and toward, instead, the whole spectrum of social practices for which printed matter provides a prompt. It asks, how accounts of print culture would look if narrated from the point of view not of human readers and users, but of the book. Turning to the nineteenth-century genre of "it-narrative"—which traces the travel of a book among a series of owners and handlers—it asks how such a narrative might compare to more familiar accounts of selves shaped by texts.
Source: Representations
Author: Leah Price
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2157658053