In the last five years, Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) store has flourished, allowing entrepreneurs and authors to upload their works for sale to Amazon's worldwide audience. The self-published works that dominate the KDP store are fiction, but local histories and memoirs have also found their way to Amazon. Many of these books are non-traditional histories; they are amateur works on community and family stories, memoirs, and life writing. This new and egalitarian historical production has considerable implications for public historians, librarians, and archivists. How it will impact or change the creation of the historical record and influence the field of history remains to be seen. This research project and its accompanying dissertation will situate some of these histories in their greater historiographical field by conducting a close reading of each, and it will utilize microhistorical methodology and standpoint theory to analyze their significance. While there have been some initial quantitative analyses of self-publishing (Dilevko and Dali, 2006; Bradley et al, 2011), no studies have conducted close readings of these texts or explored their content and subject matter in an in-depth way. This study will ultimately argue that many of these self-published works have a place in the public sphere as useful pieces of intimate, personal, and sometimes firsthand knowledge of past events, and that they should be studied as important and new styles of historical production. As records of a uniquely 21st century outlook, they offer future generations insight into American experiences from ordinary people who were previously unable to publish their thoughts, stories, and ideas without considerable financial cost to themselves, and who have now taken advantage of new technological products and publication formats to share the histories they deemed important enough to write. Further, these new technologies and KDP have facilitated a kind of "People's" expression that has and will continue to change the History of the Book.

Thesis advisor: Marjorie Howes / Networking Modernist Institutions: Technologies of Literature in Yeats, Joyce, Gissing, and Woolf explores how authors, readers, and books were linked through complex institutions that produced, distributed, organized, and manipulated literary works. More specifically, I argue that often-overlooked literary systems, such as the private press industry, postal service, and libraries, governed the interaction between books and people. In doing so, I look first to W. B. Yeats and the bookmaking traditions that shaped his notion of a sacred book of literature. By leveraging private press networks, I suggest, Yeats attempted to reimagine the book as a sacred object capable of challenging a commercialized and commodified literary world and enacting a poetic and national tradition distinct from the dominant patterns of literary production in the early twentieth century. I then trace the physical movement of texts through a study of the postal service, arguing that James Joyce reveals the various relays, diversions, destructions, and interventions associated with the movement of mail in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939), and more importantly, that Joyce’s formal experiment emanates from these everyday experiences of the mail, as books, printed and delivered, settling on the shelves of private and public institutions. The fiction of George Gissing gives insight into the uses of such spaces on the eve of modernism. I argue that Gissing’s chronicle of libraries and their uses in the late nineteenth century provides insight into how modernist authors’ ambivalence about the library and its social consequences. Finally, I turn to the fiction of Virginia Woolf, revealing some of the ways books existed as objects in the early twentieth century. As a printer, publisher, binder, reader, and writer, Woolf recognized books as everyday objects that demanded her care and attention. In her fiction, she imagines the ways in which books simultaneously build tangible barriers and create modes of intimacy. Consequently, she inscribes a modernist sense of the book that simultaneously unites its readers ideologically while keeping them physically at a distance. By extending recent studies of modernism’s response to the shifting media ecology of its day and the importance of historical readings of the bibliographical context of modernist works, I shed light on literary representations of these institutional spaces and their influence on modernist forms. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

This thesis is an investigation of literary institutions and print culture in France during the two decades following the Second World War. It demonstrates how the changing metropolitan literary marketplace, driven by new methods of book production and bookselling; the rise of internationalism and tiers-mondisme; and a nascent notion of francophonie, accommodated writing of and on sub-Saharan Africa. The first half of the thesis focuses on three institutions of particular significance: the publishing houses of Le Seuil and Présence Africaine, and the Association nationale des écrivains de la mer et de l’outre-mer, known for the literary prizes it administered. Diverse strategies for evaluating representations of sub-Saharan Africa are explored through new research in the archives of these institutions. The tensions between specialist and more commercially orientated publishing, between anti-colonial and exotic representations of sub-Saharan Africa do not map cleanly onto separate institutional contexts in this period. These tensions are underpinned by shared political and aesthetic debates, technological resources, and social contexts. The second half of the thesis analyses in greater detail the publishing process of selection, production and distribution in seven individual case-studies of novels by Christine Garnier, Abdoulaye Sadji, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Malick Fall, Amos Tutuola, Chinua Achebe and Peter Abrahams. Aspects considered include: readers’ reports and editorial revision; the use of pseudonyms; the development of named collections; the role of literary translators. My methodological approach works with, and at times against, a Bourdieusian framework, to describe the literary field in this period. More specifically, Pascale Casanova’s depiction of Paris as capital of the “World Republic of Letters” is tested and nuanced through the historical focus on the period 1945 – 67. Rather than a passive annexation to the colonial centre, African literary production is shown to be intrinsic to and constitutive of the restless political and aesthetic landscape of post-war reconstruction and decolonisation in the French-speaking world.

A partir da obra Cartas dos primeiros jesuítas do Brasil, organizada por Serafim Leite, este trabalho busca estudar alguns aspectos do processo de produção livresca do século XVI, em particular as condições de redação e de edição dos livros manuscritos e impressos, dentro e fora do ambiente da Igreja Católica, e a sua circulação na Metrópole e na Colônia. A partir da observação de um momento histórico em que a maneira de ler, escrever e difundir os textos sofreu mudanças profundas, pretende reconstruir parte da história da cultura material do livro no século XVI. / Using as reference the work \"Cartas dos Primeiros Jesuítas do Brasil\" organized by Serafim Leite, this study aims to analyse some of the aspects related to the book production process during the XVI century, particularly the ones that refer to the writing and editing of manuscripts and prints inside and outside the perimeter of the Catholic Church, and the circulation in both the Metropolis and the Colony. By analysing a particular historical moment in which the way texts were read, written and divulged went through deep changes, the study seeks to retrieve part of the history of the materiality of books in the XVI century.

A partir da obra Cartas dos primeiros jesuítas do Brasil, organizada por Serafim Leite, este trabalho busca estudar alguns aspectos do processo de produção livresca do século XVI, em particular as condições de redação e de edição dos livros manuscritos e impressos, dentro e fora do ambiente da Igreja Católica, e a sua circulação na Metrópole e na Colônia. A partir da observação de um momento histórico em que a maneira de ler, escrever e difundir os textos sofreu mudanças profundas, pretende reconstruir parte da história da cultura material do livro no século XVI. / Using as reference the work \"Cartas dos Primeiros Jesuítas do Brasil\" organized by Serafim Leite, this study aims to analyse some of the aspects related to the book production process during the XVI century, particularly the ones that refer to the writing and editing of manuscripts and prints inside and outside the perimeter of the Catholic Church, and the circulation in both the Metropolis and the Colony. By analysing a particular historical moment in which the way texts were read, written and divulged went through deep changes, the study seeks to retrieve part of the history of the materiality of books in the XVI century.

In this dissertation, I tell the story of midcentury attempts to establish, develop, and study bibliotherapy in the US. I follow three groups-hospital librarians, psychologists and psychiatrists, and language arts educators-from the 1930s to the 1960s, when each in its own ways expressed belief in the therapeutic power of reading and set out to enact that belief as a legitimate practice in the evolving contexts of its profession and in the broader culture. These professionals tried to learn what happened within people during and after reading, and they attempted to use what they learned to apply reading toward healthy ends. Today, therapeutic reading has become commonplace to the extent that it seems natural. In this dissertation, I aim to recover and explore the midcentury processes by which therapeutic reading came to seem at once natural, medical, and scientific. I argue that midcentury bibliotherapy functioned in concert with an evolving cultural narrative that I call "reading for health." The reading for health narrative gathers up into a coherent story various and deep beliefs and commonplaces about the power of books over our minds and our bodies. In midcentury bibliotherapy, reading for health was reinvigorated as a story about the marriage of science and culture, a unity narrative that claimed the iconic book-capable of swaying minds and societies alike, and burnished with all that western civilization signified-for the professions that applied reading toward their healthy ends. As I demonstrate, however, these narratives were not confined to discrete professions, but functioned as a part of a larger cultural movement set upon the shifting fault lines of the humanities and science. Each of the groups I follow took an avid interest in what I have called the embodied reader. Rather than viewing reading as an act of a disembodied mind, they understood the practice as a psychosomatic experience in which mind and body could not be disconnected. Moreover, they believed that reading could capitalize on the embodied nature of thought and affect, and engender healthy effects. In this way, the embodied reader was constructed as a new, modern locus of both the literary experience and the therapeutic ethos. By valuing above all else how reading could be used to achieve health, advocates of bibliotherapy fashioned a form of applied humanities, one that defined the meaning and judged the value of books in terms of their utility and efficacy. In so doing, they contributed to the development of a form of the medicalized humanities that now resonates in three contemporary sites: (1.) the study and use of bibliotherapy in clinical psychology; (2.) the dominant and naturalized approach to books known as therapeutic reading; and (3.) the medical humanities. / Ph. D.

This thesis provides the first account of complaint in Older Scots literature. It argues for the coherent development of a distinctively Scottish complaining voice across the fifteenth century, characterised by an interest in the relationship between amatory and ethical concerns, between stasis and narrative movement, and between male and female voices. Chapter 1 examines the literary contexts of Older Scots complaint, and identifies three paradigmatic texts for the Scottish complaint tradition: Ovid’s Heroides; Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae; and Alan of Lille’s De Planctu Naturae. Chapter 2 concentrates on the complaints in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Arch. Selden. B. 24 (c. 1489-c. 1513). It considers afresh the Scottish reception of Lydgate’s Complaint of the Black Knight and Chaucer’s Anelida and Arcite, and also offers original readings of three Scottish complaints preserved uniquely in this manuscript: the Lay of Sorrow, the Lufaris Complaynt, and the Quare of Jelusy. Chapter 3 focuses on the relationship between complaint and narrative, arguing that the complaints included in the Buik of Alexander (c. 1438), Lancelot of the Laik (c. 1460), Hary’s Wallace (c. 1476-8), and The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour (c. 1460-99) act as catalysts for narrative movement and subvert the complaint’s traditional identity as a static form. Chapter 4 is a study of complaint in Robert Henryson’s three major works: the Morall Fabillis (c. 1480s); the Testament of Cresseid (c. 1480-92); and Orpheus and Eurydice (c. 1490-2), and argues that Henryson consistently connects the complaint form with the concept of self-knowledge as part of wider discourses on effective governance. Chapter 5 presents the evidence that a text’s identity as a complaint influenced its presentation in both manuscript and print witnesses. The witnesses under discussion date predominantly from the sixteenth century; the chapter thus also uses them to explore the complaints’ later reception history.

My concern in this thesis is with the production of British school atlases between 1870 and 1930. I interpret this particular genre of map and book through the rich resource of the Bartholomew Archive, which holds the business and personal records of the Edinburgh mapmaking firm John Bartholomew & Son. School atlases were instrumental in the dissemination of geographical knowledge at a time when geographers were moulding their subject’s place in the universities and schools in Britain and in parts of the Empire beyond. This thesis builds on concepts in the history of the book, the history of the map and archive history in order to gain knowledge about the people and processes through which this particular type of mapbook was produced, moved and used, and to understand how it was bound up in the development of a discipline. In chapter 1, I outline the main themes of the thesis. The theoretical and methodological ideas underlying it are reviewed in detail in chapter 2. Chapter 3 illuminates the themes threading through the following empirical chapters, providing insight into school atlas production through a consideration of Bartholomew’s production ledgers and what these reveal about the nature of geographical publishing. Interactions between individual atlas producers form the focus of chapter 4, particularly negotiations between publishers, mapmakers, geographers and other professionals over the meaning of ‘author’. In chapter 5, I go on to address atlas production in relation to the pedagogy of regional geography used in schools and, particularly, its impact on school atlases for pupils in ‘local’ settings across the UK. This leads in chapter 6 to an interpretation of how this localising of school atlases was adapted to readers’ locations throughout the British Empire. Questions about readers’ role in the shaping of textual meaning are considered further in chapter 7, which draws on specific instances of producer-reader-atlas interactions to support the argument that reading and reviewing were processes conducted not only, as I show, by readers on the published text but, as I also indicate, they were practices performed by both producers and readers during atlas production. My findings in this thesis shed light on the publishing history of British school atlases, hitherto largely unexamined by historians of the map and historians of geography, and they contribute to our understanding of the production, movement and use of geographical knowledge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This thesis investigates how the mapping of Africa by British institutions between c.1880 and c.1915 was more complex and variable than is traditionally recognised. The study takes three ‘cuts’ into this topic, presented as journal papers, which examine: the Bartholomew map-publishing firm, the cartographic coverage of the Second Boer War, and the maps associated with Sir Harry H. Johnston. Each case-study focuses on what was produced – both quantitative output and the content of representations – and why. Informed by theories from the history of cartography, book history and the history of science, particular attention is paid to the concerns and processes embodied in the maps and map-making that are irreducible to simply ‘imperial’ discourse; these variously include editorial processes and questions of authorship, concerns for credibility and intended audiences, and the circulation and ‘life-cycles’ of maps. These findings are also explored in relation to the institutional geography of cartography in Britain: the studies illustrate the institutional contingency of such factors and how this gave rise to highly variable representations of Africa. These three empirical papers represent the first sustained studies of each of the topics. By connecting their findings, the thesis also offers broader reconceptualisations of the British mapping of Africa between c.1880 and c.1915: with respect to cartographic representations, maps as objects, and the institutions producing them. Maps did not simply reflect ‘imperial’ discourse; they were highly variable manifestations of multifaceted and institutionally contingent factors and were mobile and mutable objects that were re-used and re-produced in different ways across different settings. Mapmaking institutions were discrete but interconnected sites that not only produced different representations, but played different roles in the mapping of Africa. By illuminating the institutional provenance, ‘life-cycles’ and content of the maps studied, this thesis extends current knowledge of British mapping of Africa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and raises questions for further research incorporating its lessons, sources and theories.

This thesis examines the uses of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts in the 150 years immediately following the Norman Conquest. By focusing on the most common types of use evident in the manuscripts, it explores how readers actually interacted with books. It also treats manuscripts as cultural artefacts through which it is possible to observe the literary and social consequences of the Conquest. The Introduction summarises our current understanding of the literary culture of this transitional period. Chapter II, ‘Destruction and Conservation’, examines claims that Norman elites destroyed Anglo-Saxon manuscripts; finding these claims unjustified, it investigates the circumstances in which manuscripts were lost and identifies how readers evaluated the contents of pre-Conquest books. Chapter III, ‘The Movement of Pre-Conquest Manuscripts’, looks at the consequent loan, exchange and sale of pre-Conquest manuscripts after 1066. Chapter IV, ‘Updating Pre-Conquest Manuscripts’, discusses difficulties which Norman readers encountered with pre-Conquest books, including script, abbreviation, orthography and textual redaction, and examines how these technical features could be modernised. It also investigates more practical modernisations to liturgical books, chronicles and cartularies. Chapter V, ‘Glossing and Annotating’, concerns readers’ reactions to the texts found in pre-Conquest manuscripts, particularly vernacular homilies and translations. It argues that the post-Conquest classroom was essentially trilingual, though Latin became the lingua franca. Chapter VI, ‘Record-Keeping in Pre-Conquest Manuscripts’, explores the use of pre-Conquest manuscripts – copies of the gospels, liturgical books and patristic texts – as repositories for records. Chapter VII, ‘The Veneration of Pre-Conquest Manuscripts’, continues this exploration of the symbolic capital of pre-Conquest books by examining how Norman churchmen supported the veneration of particular manuscripts as secondary relics, and introduced new traditions regarding other books. The Conclusion refocuses the findings of this thesis on two key issues: early medieval reading practices and English literature between 1066 and 1200.