Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Books & Reading

A decade ago in the Times Literary Supplement, Roderick Conway Morris claimed that "almost everything that was going to happen in book publishing--from pocket books, instant books and pirated books, to the concept of author's copyright, company mergers, and remainders--occurred during the early days of printing." Ian Maclean's colorful survey of the flourishing learned book trade of the late Renaissance brings this assertion to life.

The story he tells covers most of Europe, with Frankfurt and its Fair as the hub of intellectual exchanges among scholars and of commercial...

Fifth Business and Alligator Pie. Stephen Leacock, Grey Owl, and Morley Callaghan: these treasured Canadian books and authors were all nurtured by the Macmillan Company of Canada, one of the country's foremost twentieth-century publishing houses. The Literary Legacy of the Macmillan Company of Canada is a unique look at the contribution of publishers and editors to the formation of the Canadian literary canon.

Ruth Panofsky's study begins in 1905 with the establishment of Macmillan Canada as a branch plant to the company's London office. While concentrating...

The eighteenth century has long been associated with realism and objective description, modes of representation that deemphasize writing. But in the middle decades of the century, Christina Lupton observes, authors described with surprising candor the material and economic facets of their own texts' production. In "Knowing Books" Lupton examines a variety of eighteenth-century sources, including sermons, graffiti, philosophical texts, and magazines, which illustrate the range and character of mid-century experiments with words announcing their status as physical objects. Books that "know"...

DISCOVER THE SECRETS OF WHAT MAKES A MEGA-BESTSELLER IN THIS ENTERTAINING, REVELATORY GUIDE
What do Michael Corleone, Jack Ryan, and Scout Finch have in common? Creative writing professor and thriller writer James W. Hall knows. Now, in this entertaining, revelatory book, he reveals how bestsellers work, using twelve twentieth-century blockbusters as case studies including "The Godfather, Gone with the Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird, "and "Jaws." From tempting glimpses inside secret societies, such as submariners in "The Hunt for Red October, "and" "Opus Dei in "The Da Vinci Code, " to...

Literary culture has become a form of popular culture over the last fifteen years thanks to the success of televised book clubs, film adaptations, big-box book stores, online bookselling, and face-to-face and online book groups. This volume offers the first critical analysis of mass reading events and the contemporary meanings of reading in the UK, USA, and Canada based on original interviews and surveys with readers and event organizers.

The resurgence of book groups has inspired new cultural formations of what the authors call "shared reading." They interrogate the enduring...