This award-winning multi-volume series is dedicated to making literature and its creators better understood and more accessible to students and interested readers, while satisfying the standards of librarians, teachers and scholars. Dictionary of Literary Biography provides reliable information in an easily comprehensible format, while placing writers in the larger perspective of literary history.Dictionary of Literary Biography systematically presents career biographies and criticism of writers from all eras and all genres through volumes dedicated to specific types of literature and time periods.For a listing of Dictionary of Literary Biography volumes sorted by genre click here.

Essays on British book collectors and bibliographers from the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries. This period marked the growth of humanism and coincides with the early Renaissance, before the widespread establishment of print culture. Focuseson the historical evolution of a specific library, as well as a collecting family. Discusses the nature and variety of collecting as a cultural activity.

The first book to investigate Jane Austen's popular significance today, Everybody's Jane considers why Austen matters to amateur readers, how they make use of her novels, what they gain from visiting places associated with her, and why they create works of fiction and nonfiction inspired by her novels and life.The voices of everyday readers emerge from both published and unpublished sources, including interviews conducted with literary tourists and archival research into the founding of the Jane Austen Society of North America and the exceptional Austen collection of Alberta Hirshheimer Burke of Baltimore.Additional topics include new Austen portraits; portrayals of Austen, and of Austen fans, in film and fiction; and hybrid works that infuse Austen's writings with horror, erotica, or explicit Christianity.Everybody's Jane will appeal to all those who care about Austen and will change how we think about the importance of literature and reading today.

This volume examines private libraries and book ownership in seventeenth-century England, with particular focus on how libraries developed over this period and the social impact that they had.

The Annual Bibliography of the History of the Printed Book and Libraries aims at recording articles of scholarly value which relate to the history of the printed book, to the history of arts, crafts, techniques and equipment, and of the economic social and cultural environment, involved in its production, distribution, conservation and description.