"Bringing together leading scholars of literature, history, library studies, and communications, Print Culture Histories Beyond the Metropolis rejects the idea that print culture necessarily spreads outwards from capitals and cosmopolitan cities and focuses attention to how the residents of smaller cities, provincial districts, rural settings, and colonial outposts have produced, disseminated, and read print materials. Too often print media has been represented as an engine of metropolitan modernity. Rather than being the passive recipients of print culture generated in city centres, the inhabitants of provinces and colonies have acted independently, as jobbing printers in provincial Britain, black newspaper proprietors in the West Indies, and library patrons in "Middletown," Indiana, to mention a few examples. This important new book gives us a sophisticated account of how printed materials circulated, a more precise sense of their impact, and a fuller of understanding of how local contexts shaped reading experiences."--

Bringing together leading scholars of literature, history, library studies, and communications, Print Culture Histories Beyond the Metropolis rejects the idea that print culture necessarily spreads outwards from capitals and cosmopolitan cities and focuses attention to how the residents of smaller cities, provincial districts, rural settings, and colonial outposts have produced, disseminated, and read print materials. Too often print media has been represented as an engine of metropolitan modernity. Rather than being the passive recipients of print culture generated in city centres, the inhabitants of provinces and colonies have acted independently, as jobbing printers in provincial Britain, black newspaper proprietors in the West Indies, and library patrons in “Middletown,” Indiana, to mention a few examples. This important new book gives us a sophisticated account of how printed materials circulated, a more precise sense of their impact, and a fuller of understanding of how local contexts shaped reading experiences.

Print Culture, Agency, and Regionality in the Hand Press Period illuminates the diverse ways that people in the British regional print trades exerted their agency through interventions in regional and national politics as well as their civic, commercial, and cultural contributions. Works printed in regional communities were a crucial part of developing narratives of local industrial, technological, and ideological progression. By moving away from understanding of print cultures outside of London as ‘provincial’, however, this book argues for a new understanding of ‘region’ as part of a network of places, emphasising opportunities for collaboration and creation that demonstrate the key role of regions within larger communities extending from the nation to the emerging sense of globality in this period. Through investigations of the men and women of the print trades outside of London, this collection casts new light on the strategies of self-representation evident in the work of regional print cultures, as well as their contributions to individual regional identities and national narratives.

Introduction to Contemporary Print Culture examines the role of the book in the modern world. It considers the book’s deeply intertwined relationships with other media through ownership structures, copyright and adaptation, the constantly shifting roles of authors, publishers and readers in the digital ecosystem and the merging of print and digital technologies in contemporary understandings of the book object. Divided into three parts, the book first introduces students to various theories and methods for understanding print culture, demonstrating how the study of the book has grown out of longstanding academic disciplines. The second part surveys key sectors of the contemporary book world – from independent and alternative publishers to editors, booksellers, readers and libraries – focusing on topical debates. In the final part, digital technologies take centre stage as eBook regimes and mass-digitisation projects are examined for what they reveal about information power and access in the twenty-first century. This book provides a fascinating and informative introduction for students of all levels in publishing studies, book history, literature and English, media, communication and cultural studies, cultural sociology, librarianship and archival studies and digital humanities.

This study examines a network of writers that coalesced around the publication of The History of Mary Prince (1831), which recounts Prince's experiences as an enslaved person in the West Indies and the events that brought her to seek assistance from the Anti-Slavery Society in London. It focuses on the three writers who produced the text - Mary Prince, Thomas Pringle, and Susanna Moodie - with glances at their pro-slavery opponent, James MacQueen, and their literary friends and relatives. The History connects the Black Atlantic, a diasporic formation created through the colonial trade in enslaved people, with the Anglophone Atlantic, created through British migration and colonial settlement. It also challenges Romantic ideals of authorship as an autonomous creative act and the literary text as an aesthetically unified entity. Collaborating with Prince on the History's publication impacted Moodie's and Pringle's attitudes towards slavery and shaped their own accounts of migration and settlement.

Broad-ranging essays on the social, political, and cultural significance of more than a century's worth of newspaper publishing practices across the African continent

Anglo-India's regional literature was both a practical and imaginative response to a pivotal period in the early colonialism of South Asia. Awarded as Honorable Mention of the Louis Gottschalk Prize by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS). Shortlisted for the Kenshur Prize by the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Indiana University, John Ben Snow Prize by the North American Conference on British Studies, Marilyn Gaull Book Award by the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association. During the later decades of the eighteenth century, a rapid influx of English-speaking Europeans arrived in India with an interest in expanding the creation and distribution of anglophone literature. At the same time, a series of military, political, and economic successes for the British in Asia created the first global crisis to shepherd in an international system of national ideologies. In this study of colonial literary production, James Mulholland proposes that the East India Company was a central actor in the institutionalization of anglophone literary culture in India. The EIC drew its employees from around the British Isles, bringing together people with a wide variety of ethnic and national origins. Its cultural infrastructure expanded from presses and newspapers to poetry collections, letters, paper-making and selling, circulating libraries, and amateur theaters. Recovering this rich archive of documents and activities, Mulholland shows how regional reading and writing reflected the knotty geopolitical situation and the comingling of Anglo and Indian cultures at a moment when the subcontinent's colonial future was not yet clear. He shows why Anglo-Indian literary publics cohered during this period, reexamining the relationship between writing in English and imperial power in a way that moves beyond the easy correspondence of literature as an instrument of empire. Tracing regional and "translocal" links among Madras, Calcutta, Bombay, and settlements surrounding the Bay of Bengal, Before the Raj recovers a network of authors, reading publics, and corporate agents to demonstrate that anglophone literature adapted itself to geographical politics and social circumstances, rather than being simply imitative of the works produced in the English metropole. Mulholland introduces readers to figures like the Calcutta-born Eyles Irwin, the first man to sustain a literary career from India. We also meet James Romney, an army officer who wrote poems and plays, including a stage adaptation of Tristram Shandy. Alongside these men were anonymous female poets, hailed as the harbingers of an "anglo-asiatic taste," and captive adolescent Europeans who, caught up in the conflict with southern India's last independent ruler, Tipu Sultan, were forcibly converted to Islam, castrated, and made to cross-dress as "dancing boys" for Tipu's entertainment. Revealing the vibrant literary culture that existed long before the characters of Rudyard Kipling's best-known works, Before the Raj reveals how these writers operated within a web of colonial cities and trading outposts that borrowed from one another and produced vital interlinked aesthetics.