This dissertation argues for a recentering of the book medium in the study of contemporary literature. Recent works by popular authors such as Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves) and Jonathan Safran Foer (Tree of Codes) demonstrate an artistic resurgence of this material forma…
"12" Result
Sort By:
Glimpses of the World: The Vignette in 21st-Century American Fiction examines the relationship between contemporary digital and print fictions that center their critique in the short form of the vignette. Delineating a media archeology of short textual and visual forms in and ar…
This dissertation answers the question: How do material and human constraints shape political communication? Historians of China and other societies have studied the discourses of political propaganda, their efficacy, and how people subvert them. Much less is known, however, abo…
This dissertation investigates how writers in the People’s Republic of China during the Late Reform Era (1989–2012) represented through media the existential challenges facing their profession and the institution of Chinese literature. During this period, the state began to dive…
This thesis provides a chronological narrative of the major trends in the history of rebinding incunabula. There is currently very little academic literature that focuses on the practice of rebinding as a subset of book history, largely because it is regarded in bibliographic ci…
“Jane Porter in the Margins: Paratext in the Romantic National Novel” argues that Romantic novelist Jane Porter uses paratext in her national novels to accomplish bold political and personal goals. I examine her most famous novel The Scottish Chiefs (1810) as a case study of Rom…
This thesis examines three key anthologies by Bishop Thomas Percy as a means of discussing ideas of British identity. It is argued here that the imaginative construction of Britain in the century following the Union of 1707 is anthological in its nature, and therefore that antho…
This dissertation argues that book display significantly modifies Robert Darnton’s theory on the communications circuit and life cycle of the book. Antebellum American bookcases conveyed social, cultural, and symbolic capital that not only characterized shared aspirations, but a…
This dissertation examines gift books in the context of the social, literary, and print landscape of the antebellum United States, contending that the books are key sites for examining the intersection of commercial, political, and sentimental interests. While gift books frequen…
This dissertation argues that, contrary to popular conceptions and the current scholarly consensus, rabbinic Jewry did not become a people of the book, or even the people of the Book, until the high middle ages. For in the classical rabbinic period, many rabbinic authorities app…
Printing in the Arab world, unlike its European counterparts, only became regionally prevalent during the late nineteenth century. As such, studies on Arabic printing in Middle Eastern cities emphasize the press's late nineteenth-century modernizing role, particularly its standa…