The new biography of the publisher and bookseller who premiered the work of Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson deftly integrates Dodsley's life story with the literary transition from court patronage to the age of print that paved the way for the Romantic movement of the 19th century. Solomon (English, Auburn U.) details the unique circumstances that led Dodsley from his position as a weaver's apprentice to his career as a playwright, culminating in his last incarnation as one of the most influential literary forces of his time. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This is the first book on British theatre historiography. It traces the practice of theatre history from its origins in the Restoration to its emergence as an academic discipline in the early twentieth century. In this compelling revisionist study, Richard Schoch reclaims the deep history of British theatre history, valorizing the usually overlooked scholarship undertaken by antiquarians, booksellers, bibliographers, journalists and theatrical insiders, none of whom considered themselves to be professional historians. Drawing together deep archival research, close readings of historical texts from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and an awareness of contemporary debates about disciplinary practice, Schoch overturns received interpretations of British theatre historiography and shows that the practice - and the diverse practitioners - of theatre history were far more complicated and far more sophisticated than we had realised. His book is a landmark contribution to how theatre historians today can understand their own history.

Patriotism and Public Spirit is an innovative study of the formative influences shaping the early writings of the Irish-English statesman Edmund Burke and an early case-study of the relationship between the business of bookselling and the politics of criticism and persuasion. Through a radical reassessment of the impact of Burke's "Irishness" and of his relationship with the London-based publisher Robert Dodsley, the book argues that Burke saw Patriotism as the best way to combine public spirit with the reinforcement of civil order and to combat the use of coded partisan thinking to achieve the dominance of one section of the population over another. No other study has drawn so extensively on the literary and commercial network through which Burke's first writings were published to help explain them. By linking contemporary reinterpretations of the work of Patriot sympathizers and writers such as Alexander Pope and Lord Bolingbroke with generally neglected trends in religious and literary criticism in the Republic of Letters, this book provides new ways of understanding Burke's early publications. The results call into question fundamental assumptions about the course of "Enlightenment" thought and challenge currently dominant post-colonialist and Irish nationalist interpretations of the early Burke.

This study provides one of the most detailed and comprehensive examinations ever devoted to a critical transformation in the material substance of the printed page; it carries out this exploration in the history of the book, moreover, by embedding these typographical changes in the context of other cultural phenomena in eighteenth-century Britain. The gradual abandonment of pervasive capitalization, italics, and caps and small caps in books printed in London, Dublin, and the American colonies between 1740 and 1780 is mapped in five-year increments which reveal that the appearance of the modern page in English began to emerge around 1765. This descriptive and analytical account focuses on poetry, classical texts, Shakespeare, contemporary plays, the novel, the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, sermons and religious writings, newspapers, magazines, anthologies, government publications, and private correspondence; it also examines the reading public, canon formation, editorial theory and practice, and the role of typography in textual interpretation. These changes in printing conventions are then compared to other aspects of cultural change: the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1752, the publication of Johnson's Dictionary in 1755, the transformation of shop signs and the imposition of house numbers in London beginning in 1762, and the evolution of the English language and of English prose style. This study concludes that this fundamental shift in printing conventions was closely tied to a pervasive interest in refinement, regularity, and standardization in the second half of the century—and that it was therefore an important component in the self-conscious process of modernizing British culture.

From Tottel's Miscellany (1557) to the last twentieth-century Oxford Book of English Verse (1999), anthologies have been a prime institution for the preservation and mediation of poetry. The importance of anthologies for creating and re-creating the canon of English poetry, for introducing ‘new' programmes of poetry, as a record of changing poetic fashions, audience tastes and reading practices, or as a profitable literary commodity has often been asserted. Despite its impact, however, the poetry anthology in itself has attracted surprisingly little critical interest in Britain or elsewhere in the English-speaking world. This volume is the first publication to explore the largely unmapped field of poetry anthologies in Britain. Essays written from a wide range of perspectives in literary and cultural studies, and the point of view of poets, editors, publishers and cultural institutions, aim to do justice to the typological, functional and historical variety with which this form of publication has manifested itself - from early modern print culture to the postmodern age of the world wide web.

This fully annotated edition sheds much light on eighteenth-century British literary and publishing history.

This twenty-seventh volume of ABHB (Annual bibliography of the history of the printed book and libraries) contains 5076 records, selected from some 1000 periodicals, the list of which follows this introduction. They have been compiled by the National Committees of the following countries: Arab Countries Italy Australia Latin America Austria Latvia Lithuania Belarus Belgium Luxembourg Bulgaria Mexico The Netherlands Canada Croatia Poland Estonia Portugal Finland Rumania France Russia Germany South Africa Great Britain Spain Hungary Sweden Switzerland Iceland Ukraine Ireland Israel USA Benevolent readers are requested to signal the names of bibliographers and historians from countries not mentioned above, who would be willing to co-operate to this scheme of international bibliographic collaboration. The editor will greatly appreciate any communication on this matter. Subject As has been said in the introduction to the previous volumes, this biblio graphy aims at recording all books and articles of scholarly value which relate to the history of the printed book, to the history of the arts, crafts, techniques and equipment, and of the economic, social and cultural envi ronment, involved in its production, distribution, conservation, and descrip tion. Of course, the ideal of a complete coverage is nearly impossible to at tain. However, it is the policy of this publication to include missing items as VIII INTRODUCTION much as possible in the forthcoming volumes. The same applies to coun tries newly added to the bibliography.