Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age - Hardcover

Piper, Andrew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226669726 ISBN 13: 9780226669724

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2009

Synopsis

At the turn of the nineteenth century, publishing houses in London, New York, Paris, Stuttgart, and Berlin produced books in ever greater numbers. But it was not just the advent of mass printing that created the era’s “bookish” culture. According to Andrew Piper, romantic writing and romantic writers played a crucial role in adjusting readers to this increasingly international and overflowing literary environment. Learning how to use and to want books occurred through more than the technological, commercial, or legal conditions that made the growing proliferation of books possible; the making of such bibliographic fantasies was importantly a product of the symbolic operations contained within books as well.

            Examining novels, critical editions, gift books, translations, and illustrated books, as well as the communities who made them, Dreaming in Books tells a wide-ranging story of the book’s identity at the turn of the nineteenth century. In so doing, it shows how many of the most pressing modern communicative concerns are not unique to the digital age but emerged with a particular sense of urgency during the bookish upheavals of the romantic era. In revisiting the book’s rise through the prism of romantic literature, Piper aims to revise our assumptions about romanticism, the medium of the printed book, and, ultimately, the future of the book in our so-called digital age.

About this title

About the Author

Andrew Piper is professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University. He is the author of Enumerations: Data and Literary Study, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age and Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times, all published by the University of Chicago Press. He is also a founding member of the Multigraph Collective, a group of twenty-two scholars that recently published Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation, also with the University of Chicago Press.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226669726
• ISBN 13: 9780226669724
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320