Michael Gavin: Writing Print Cultures Past (Rutgers History of the Book event on December 3)
Michael Gavin (English, Rutgers University)
Writing Print Cultures Past: How the History of Literary Criticism Can Contribute to the History of the Book
Thursday, 3 December
5 p.m.
Plangere Annex, Murray Hall
510 George Street, New Brunswick
In recent years, book historians have focused on the late seventeenth
century as a period of crucial transformation in authorship and
reading practices in England. Such studies often turn to paratextual
matter like prefaces and dedications for their strongest evidence
about how authors, patrons, publishers, and readers negotiated their
roles in the changing literary marketplace. This archive of
evidence corresponds closely with the archive of early criticism, most
of which found expression in the same paratexts that book
historians use in their social histories of print. Yet, although they
share common artifacts, these two lines of inquiry remain largely
divorced: preface-as-criticism and preface-as-authorship-discourse
imply separate methodological and theoretical investments,
loosely encapsulated as intellectual and cultural history, which
rarely have found common cause. In this lecture, I will attempt to
bring these threads of argument together to show how the history of
literary criticism as such can contribute to the history of the
book (and vice versa).
Event organized by the Rutgers Seminar in the History of the Book.
Our website at: http://comminfo.rutgers.edu/book_history/RSHOB_2009-2010.html
For more information, please call (732) 932-8426 or email info@cca.rutgers.edu.
Sponsored by the Center for Cultural Analysis; the School of Communication and Information; the Program in Early Modern Studies; the Departments of French, English, and History; the Transliteratures Project; and the Rutgers University Libraries
