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In Early Modern Europe the first readers of a book were not those who bought it. They were the scribes who copied the author’s or translator’s manuscript, the censors who licensed it, the publisher who decided to put this title in his catalogue, the copy editor who prepared the text for the press, divided it and added punctuation, the typesetters who composed the pages of the book, and the proof reader who corrected them. The author’s hand cannot be separated from the printers’ mind. This book is devoted to the process of publication of the works that framed their readers’ representations of the past or of the world. Linking cultural history, textual criticism and bibliographical studies, dealing with canonical works - like Cervantes’ Don Quixote or Shakespeare’s plays - as well as lesser known texts, Roger Chartier identifies the fundamental discontinuities that transformed the circulation of the written word between the invention of printing and the definition, three centuries later, of what we call 'literature'.
Within just a generation or two of its arrival, print had become a ubiquitous and spirited part of Spain and Portugal’s urban cultures. It serviced an ever-expanding reading public, as well as many and varied practical quotidian needs. Its impact on society was multi-dimensional and complex, and its social reach far broader than the civic or ecclesiastical elites were ever to be entirely comfortable with. This cross-disciplinary volume of essays focuses on the maturing marketplace for print in the first half of the seventeenth century, shedding new light on some important transformations, with authors and publishers seizing opportunities available to them – negotiating the regulatory efforts of the censors, and scrambling to reconfigure their relationship with their readers.
Essays compare early modern Spanish writers to their contemporaries in other countries and to modern Spanish and Latin American literature
This provocative new history of early modern Europe argues that changes in the generation, preservation and circulation of information, chiefly on newly available and affordable paper, constituted an 'information revolution'. In commerce, finance, statecraft, scholarly life, science, and communication, early modern Europeans were compelled to place a new premium on information management. These developments had a profound and transformative impact on European life. The huge expansion in paper records and the accompanying efforts to store, share, organize and taxonomize them are intertwined with many of the essential developments in the early modern period, including the rise of the state, the Print Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, and the Republic of Letters. Engaging with historical questions across many fields of human activity, Paul M. Dover interprets the historical significance of this 'information revolution' for the present day, and suggests thought-provoking parallels with the informational challenges of the digital age.
María de Zayas y Sotomayor (1590–1650?) published two collections of novellas, Novelas amorosas y exemplares (1637) and Desengaños amorosos (1647), which were immensely popular in her day. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Victorian and bourgeois sensibilities exiled her “scandalous” works to the outer fringes of serious literature. Over the last two decades, however, she has gained an enthusiastic and ever-expanding readership, drawing intense critical attention and achieving canonical status as a major figure of the Spanish Golden Age. In this first comprehensive study of Zayas’s prose, Margaret R. Greer explores the relationship between narration and desire, a...
The essays in this volume are concerned with early printed narrative texts in Western Europe. The aim of this book is to consider to what extent the shift from hand-written to printed books left its mark on narrative literature in a number of vernacular languages. Did the advent of printing bring about changes in the corpus of narrative texts when compared with the corpus extant in manuscript copies? Did narrative texts that already existed in manuscript form undergo significant modifications when they began to be printed? How did this crucial media development affect the nature of these narratives? Which strategies did early printers develop to make their texts commercially attractive? Which social classes were the target audiences for their editions? Around half of the articles focus on developments in the history of early printed narrative texts, others discuss publication strategies. This book provides an impetus for cross-linguistic research. It invites scholars from various disciplines to get involved in an international conversation about fifteenth- and sixteenth-century narrative literature.
Economic Imperatives for Women’s Writing in Early Modern Europe addresses the central question of the professionalization of women’s writing before the eighteenth-century from a comparatist perspective, offering intriguing case studies on as yet an underdeveloped area in early modern studies.
In this book on the relationship between pícaro and cortesano, Felipe E. Ruan argues that these two cultural figures are linked by a shared form of deportment centered on prudent self-accommodation. This behavior is generated and governed by a courtly ethos or habitus that emerges as the result of the growth and influence of the court in Madrid. Ruan posits that both pícaro and cortesano, and their respective books, conduct manual and picaresque narrative, tacitly engage questions of identity and individualism by highlighting the valued resources or forms of capital that come to fashion and sustain self-identity. He places the books of the pícaro and cortesano within the larger polemic of early modern identity and individualism, and offers an account of the individual as agent whose actions are grounded on objective social relations, without those actions being simply the result of mechanistic adherence to the social order.
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Written by an international group of scholars, this edited collection provides an overview of the Spanish picaresque from its origins in tales of lowborn adventurers to its importance for the modern novel, along with consideration of the debates that the picaresque has inspired.