At one major publishing house, there is a running joke that the second book published on the Gutenberg press was about the death of the publishing business. While this joke is an obvious exaggeration, there is a certain amount of truth that with each advance in technology, with each printing innovation or invention, a similar death dynamic occurred. This was most noticeable during the tumultuous years of the eighteenth century when a veritable flood of printing techniques, business practices, reading formats, and sources for reading material was introduced. The cultural reaction to each new technological change, while not exactly the same in all respects, exhibited a series of characteristics that closely mirrored each other. In each case, readers reacted in various ways against the innovation and supported the traditional publishing industry and, in their reaction, created, modified, and maintained a sense of their own identity.

During the early part of the eighteenth century, the growth of the book trades depended upon a series of technological advances. With each innovation, new forms of printed material, such as newspapers, essays, novels, and biographies became available and in many cases, extremely popular. Cultural perceptions of popularity among the growing body of readers, however, immediately relegated most of these new forms to a subaltern status. As the new readers became new writers, subcultures developed around each new form, which then changed the perceived social status of both the members of the subculture and the textual form. Even though printed materials has often been seen as simple commodities, reading subcultures of the eighteenth century had the power to redefine the social meaning of a given textual form and they often did so because in changing the status of the text they could also alter their own status. The members of these various subcultures used their associated textual form as a means to redefine their own identity as well as the social status of the text itself. Each of the varieties of publications gained or lost social status based upon their association with particular subcultures. In this way, the formation of textual subcultures provided a conduit through which individuals could create, maintain, and renegotiate personal identity. By examining the creation of specific textual subcultures in conjunction with shifts in technology, my work offers a new, empirically supported model for understanding the precise relationship between reading and identity formation at the moment when modern, market-based culture came into existence. Challenging the interpretive tradition established by Ian Watt in the 1950s, I formulate a dynamic model of identity creation based upon the perception of technological membership. Because Watt's focus, as well as those of many succeeding critics, was upon a single genre rather than upon individuals' interaction with new print mediums, the current understanding of eighteenth-century identity is a progressively static model of reading which cannot be applied beyond that specific historical period. My work directly challenges current ideas of subculture formation and the inherent bonds between members by establishing how writers negotiated their own self-perceptions through authorial participation and, ultimately, defined their own social status. By determining how people created their own cultural identities through associations with forms of printed material and evolving technologies, my work reconsiders previous interpretations of literary history based upon economic class formation and prompts re-evaluations of basic critical literary terms, such as 'literature,' 'popular,' and 'aesthetic worth.' With a new model for understanding identity formation in market culture, my research offers models extending beyond the eighteenth century and informing current debates about textual cultures. In recent years, the mass digitization of printed material has prompted announcements of both the death of the book and a decrease in mass literacy; yet, online communication, particularly social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter, has grown dramatically. Computer technology, in this respect, is no more than another phase of printing innovations, which itself is fostering the creation of new reading subcultures.

"Ezell's interdisciplinary approach draws together the history of the book and cultural history. The result allows the reader a glimpse of literary life as practiced by "social" authors in the context of the development of commercial publishing and the formalization of copyright laws defining texts and authors."--BOOK JACKET.

The Author's Due offers an institutional and cultural history of books, the book trade, and the bibliographic ego. Joseph Loewenstein traces the emergence of possessive authorship from the establishment of a printing industry in England to the passage of the 1710 Statute of Anne, which provided the legal underpinnings for modern copyright. Along the way he demonstrates that the culture of books, including the idea of the author, is intimately tied to the practical trade of publishing those books. As Loewenstein shows, copyright is a form of monopoly that developed alongside a range of related protections such as commercial trusts, manufacturing patents, and censorship, and cannot be understood apart from them. The regulation of the press pitted competing interests and rival monopolistic structures against one another—guildmembers and nonprofessionals, printers and booksellers, authors and publishers. These struggles, in turn, crucially shaped the literary and intellectual practices of early modern authors, as well as early capitalist economic organization. With its probing look at the origins of modern copyright, The Author's Due will prove to be a watershed for historians, literary critics, and legal scholars alike.

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The Model Rules of Professional Conduct provides an up-to-date resource for information on legal ethics. Federal, state and local courts in all jurisdictions look to the Rules for guidance in solving lawyer malpractice cases, disciplinary actions, disqualification issues, sanctions questions and much more. In this volume, black-letter Rules of Professional Conduct are followed by numbered Comments that explain each Rule's purpose and provide suggestions for its practical application. The Rules will help you identify proper conduct in a variety of given situations, review those instances where discretionary action is possible, and define the nature of the relationship between you and your clients, colleagues and the courts.