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'In this fascinating book, the historian Jean-Yves Mollier highlights the astonishing diversity of roles assumed by booksellers throughout the ages and the continents' Express 'Jean-Yves Mollier . . . traces meticulously the transformations of a profession and a trade recognised now as essential . . . helping us to understand why bookshops remain dear to the hearts of readers' Le Monde A fascinating exploration of the role of the bookseller through the ages. Across the world and from antiquity to the present day, men and women have enabled authors to disseminate their ideas and knowledge, helping readers to become enriched by their words. Over the centuries, a profession was invented - the b...
A COMPANION TO THE HISTORY OF THE BOOK A COMPANION TO THE HISTORY OF THE BOOK Edited by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose “As a stimulating overview of the multidimensional present state of the field, the Companion has no peer.” Choice “If you want to understand how cultures come into being, endure, and change, then you need to come to terms with the rich and often surprising history Of the book ... Eliot and Rose have done a fine job. Their volume can be heartily recommended. “ Adrian Johns, Technology and Culture From the early Sumerian clay tablet through to the emergence of the electronic text, this Companion provides a continuous and coherent account of the history of the book. A te...
Linking the study of business and politics, Christine Haynes reconstructs the passionate and protracted debate over the development of the book trade in nineteenth-century France. In tracing the contest over literary production in France, Haynes emphasizes the role of the Second Empire in enacting - but also in limiting - press freedom and literary property.
A literary scholar and investment banker applies economic criticism to canonical novels, dramatically changing the way we read these classics and proposing a new model for how economics can inform literary analysis. Every writer is a player in the marketplace for literature. Jonathan Paine locates the economics ingrained within the stories themselves, revealing how a text provides a record of its author’s attempt to sell the story to his or her readers. An unusual literary scholar with a background in finance, Paine mines stories for evidence of the conditions of their production. Through his wholly original reading, Balzac’s The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans becomes a secret diar...
Continuing on to the electronic revolution, Martin's account takes in the changes wrought on writing by computers and electronic systems of storage and communication, and offers surprising insights into the influence these new technologies have had on children born into the computer age. The power of writing to influence and dominate is, indeed, a central theme in this history, as Martin explores the processes by which the written word has gradually imposed its logic on society over four thousand years. The summation of decades of study by one of the world's great scholars on the subject, this fascinating account of writing explains much about the world we inhabit, where we uneasily confer, accept, and resist the power of the written word.
Communicating in Canada's Past evolved out of essays presented at the inaugural Conference on Media History in Canada of 2006, which brought together media historians from across the disciplines and from both French and English Canada. The first collection of its kind, this volume assembles both well-established and up-and-coming scholars to address sizable gaps in the literature on media history in Canada. Communicating in Canada's Past includes a substantial introduction to media history as a field of study, historiographical essays by senior scholars Mary Vipond, Paul Rutherford, and Fernande Roy, and original research essays on a range of subjects, including print journalism, radio, television, and advertising. Editors Gene Allen and Daniel J. Robinson have provided a sophisticated, wide-ranging introduction for those who are new to media history while also assembling a valuable collection of new research and theory for those already familiar with the field.
For those who lived in the wake of the French Revolution, its aftermath left a profound wound that no subsequent king, emperor, or president could heal. "Children of the Revolution" follows the ensuing generations who repeatedly tried and failed to come up with a stable regime after the trauma of 1789.
There is a long history of inventing illness, such as pretending to be sick for attention or accusing others of being ill. This volume explores the art of illness, and the deceptions and truths around health and bodies, from a multiplicity of angles from antiquity to the present. The chapters, which are based on primary-source evidence ranging from antiquity to the late twentieth century, are divided into three sections. The first part explores how the idea of faking illness was understood and conceptualized across multiple fields, locations, and time periods. The second part uses case studies to emphasize the human element of those at the center of these narratives and how their behavior was shaped by societal attitudes. The third part investigates the development of regulations and laws governing malingering and malingerers. Altogether, they paint a picture of humans doing human actions—cheating, lying, stealing, but also hiding, surviving, working. This book’s careful, accessible scholarship is a valuable resource for academics, scientists, and the sophisticated undergraduate audience interested in malingering narratives throughout history.
This book contributes to bridge the gap between different scholarly communities interested in the entanglements of culture and politics in the international arena. It sheds light on existing connections in their parallel evolution with a thorough literature review, complemented by several case studies showing the fruitful character of their interdisciplinary mobilisation. Through the notions of cultural relations, intellectual cooperation and cultural diplomacy, the book draws on a soft power perspective to offer a shared, novel, and interdisciplinary theoretical framework to approach cultural institutions and organisations that have been previously examined as isolated objects: for example, cultural institutes, international organisations, literary magazines, and literary contests. The interdisciplinary nature of this volume justifies the relevance of its content for scholars working in the history of international relations, international cultural relations and intellectual history, comparative literature, sociology of literature and global literary studies.
This book reveals the transformation of political rallies in France from the last years of the Second Empire until the end of the Third Republic. Originally designed by Republicans as a tool of citizenship learning and formation of political opinion through open debate, rallies gradually became a stage dedicated to the show of force, at the initiative of various emerging political formations. This distortion is marked by the turn of the twentieth century, but is observed even more in the rallies held between the two world wars. Faced with this transformation, the government does not hesitate, in the second half of the 1930s, to invalidate the liberal credo that based the right of assembly since the installation of the Republic. This book, at the crossroads of history and political science, is an important contribution to our understanding of political life of that period. An essential form of collective political participation, the rallies had never been the subject of major research. The author also contributes to the reflection, more relevant than ever, on the status of public debate in representative regimes. Participatory democracy has a history that this book helps to trace.