Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature

Knight, Jeffrey Todd

ISBN 10: 0812245075 / ISBN 13: 9780812245073

Editore: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013

Riguardo questo articolo

First Edition. Inscribed by author on the half-title page. 8vo. - over 7¾ in. - 9¾ in., 279pp. Good hardcover copy in Near Fine dust jacket; tight binding, boards clean and sharp, bears a light tobacco aroma, clean interior. Near Fine dust jacket clean and sharp, no tears, in mylar cover.

Codice articolo 663005

Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature
• Editore: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2013
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0812245075
• ISBN 13: 9780812245073
• Rilegatura: Hardcover
• Edizione: First Edition.
• Condizione: Good
• Condizione della sovraccoperta: Near Fine
• Peso: 1,35 once
• Firmato: Signed & Inscribed By Author
• Cataloghi dei venditori:
  • Books on Books

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

Concealed in rows of carefully restored volumes in rare book libraries is a history of the patterns of book collecting and compilation that shaped the literature of the English Renaissance. In this early period of print, before the introduction of commercial binding, most published literary texts did not stand on shelves in discrete, standardized units. They were issued in loose sheets or temporarily stitched—leaving it to the purchaser or retailer to collect, configure, and bind them. In Bound to Read, Jeffrey Todd Knight excavates this culture of compilation—of binding and mixing texts, authors, and genres into single volumes—and sheds light on a practice that not only was pervasive but also defined the period's very ways of writing and thinking.

Through a combination of archival research and literary criticism, Knight shows how Renaissance conceptions of imaginative writing were inextricable from the material assembly of texts. While scholars have long identified an early modern tendency to borrow and redeploy texts, Bound to Read reveals that these strategies of imitation and appropriation were rooted in concrete ways of engaging with books. Knight uncovers surprising juxtapositions such as handwritten sonnets collected with established poetry in print and literary masterpieces bound with liturgical texts and pamphlets. By examining works by Shakespeare, Spenser, Montaigne, and others, he dispels the notion of literary texts as static or closed, and instead demonstrates how the unsettled conventions of early print culture fostered an idea of books as interactive and malleable.

Though firmly rooted in Renaissance culture, Knight's carefully calibrated arguments also push forward to the digital present—engaging with the modern library archives where these works were rebound and remade, and showing how the custodianship of literary artifacts shapes our canons, chronologies, and contemporary interpretative practices.

Informazioni sull'autore

Jeffrey Todd Knight is Assistant Professor of English and Co-Director of the Textual Studies Program at the University of Washington.