Call for Papers: Conference at University of Manchester, 21 January 2010

The History of the Book: Culture, Community, Criticism

Chetham’s Library and the University of Manchester are pleased to
announce their third one-day interdisciplinary history of the book and
material culture conference at Chetham's Library, Manchester, taking
place Thursday 21st January 2010.

Call for Papers

We invite 20-minute papers from postgraduate students of any discipline
who are interested in book history and material culture. Our aim this
year is to encourage the combining of methodologies developed in book
history in the last thirty years with those of other currents in
twentieth-century cultural theory, literary criticism and the study of
community. While all abstracts relating to book history and material
culture will be considered, we particularly welcome papers that engage
any of the following areas:

- The use book history can make of other twentieth-century cultural and
literary theory; what might book history perspectives have to say about
the writing and dissemination of these intellectual trends?
- The tension between practices of ‘form and content’ reading and book
history’s interest in paratextual apparatuses, editorial processes and
distribution.
- The relationship between the texts and materials we study and the
communities that produce them; study of the evidence of how communities
inscribe themselves into texts as in the study of second hand books, or
communal responses to texts as in fan fiction.
- The national or cross-cultural transmission of texts, the function of
technology in this transmission and the production of international
readerships.

Guest Speakers

We are very pleased to announce that Joad Raymond (University of East
Anglia) and Isabel Rivers (Queen Mary, University of London) have
agreed to present guest papers at our event. Professor Raymond will be
discussing Milton and the pan-European circulation of newsbooks in the
seventeenth century, and Professor Rivers will present her current
research on the culture of religious publishing in the eighteenth
century.

It's free! And so is lunch!

Thanks to the support of the School of Arts, Histories and Cultures
SAGE Postgraduate Training Programme, there will be no charge for the
conference or for the conference lunch.

Abstracts

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be sent to
book-history@manchester.ac.uk by Friday 20th November 2009.

To register to attend please contact the same with details of your
position/institution.

Email: book-history@manchester.ac.uk