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This thesis provides a full-length critical treatment of the Essayes (1600-01) of Sir William Cornwallis (c.1579-1614). Cornwallis' Essayes are the first examples of the ‘familiar’ essay in English: to which the rhetorical shaping of persona and the use of the personal voice are central. This is the first such study of Cornwallis since the first half of the twentieth century, and situates his Essayes within their cultural, social, and material contexts. The thesis draws upon previous work on Cornwallis and his Essayes from the 1930s and 1940s, but also on recent developments in early-modern English studies, especially in the fields of the history of rhetoric and the history of reading. The thesis challenges the assumptions behind two major critical approaches to the early-modern essay: firstly that it is a form in which the personal voice can be unambiguously expressed, and secondly that it is an essentially unoriginal genre which is more closely related to reading than to writing. This thesis qualifies these approaches, while demonstrating that the origins of each are found in the rhetorical practices of early English essays. This thesis argues however that Cornwallis’s essays are elaborate fusions of classical commonplaces, humanistic rhetoric, and ethical theories of how to live, resulting from complex interactions between different strands of humanistic educative practices, and that Cornwallis’s use of the personal voice is shaped by ethically-inflected rhetorical theories of affect and imitation. The thesis further attempts to think about how essays were being read in this period, and to do so offers a study of the material traces of reading, in the form of annotations and commonplace books, left by early-modern readers of John Florio’s English translation of Montaigne (1603).

This thesis examines the book in the nineteenth century by way of an unusual corpus: movable and novelty books for children, drawn from the Opie Collection of Children’s Literature at the Bodleian Library. It argues that these items, which have been either ignored or actively dismissed by scholars of children’s literature, are of two-fold significance for the history of the book: they encourage a sense of the book as a constitutively (rather than an incidentally) material object, and they demand an understanding of reading as not just a mental activity, but a physical one as well. Each of the first five chapters of the thesis centres on a different format. The opening chapter discusses the Regency-era paper doll books produced by Samuel and Joseph Fuller, exposing the tension between form and content in these works. The second chapter looks at Victorian panorama books for children, showing how the panorama format affects space, time, and the structure of any text accompanying the image. The third chapter reads the pop-up book’s key tension—the tension between surface and depth in the pursuit of an illusion of three dimensions—in terms of flat, theatrical, and stereoscopic picture-making, three other nineteenth-century pictorial modes in which an illusion of three-dimensionality is important. The fourth chapter traces self-reflexive accounts of printing, publishing, and the material book in dissolving-view books produced by the German publisher and printer Ernest Nister at the end of the nineteenth century. The fifth chapter positions the late nineteenth-century mechanical books designed and illustrated by Lothar Meggendorfer in terms of two material analogies, the puppet and the mechanical toy or automaton. The final chapter synthesizes evidence as to how the movable book could and should be read from across formats, foregrounding in particular the ways in which the movable embodies reading.

This thesis examines the production of the Middle English poetic manuscript. It analyses the mise-en-page of manuscripts created during a crucial period for book production, immediately after 1400, when there was a sudden explosion in the production of vernacular manuscripts of literary texts, when the demand for books increased, and the commercial book trade swiftly followed. It offers a close analysis of the mise-en-page of the manuscripts of three central authors: Chaucer’s, Gower’s, and Hoccleve’s manuscripts were at the heart of this sudden flourishing and were, crucially, produced when scribal methods for creating the literary page were still unformed. Previous studies have focused on the localised readings produced by single scribes, manuscripts, or authors, offering a limited examination of broader trends. This study offers a wider comparison: where individual studies offer localised analysis, the multi-textuality of this thesis offers broader perceptions of book production and of scribal responses to the new literary texts being produced. In analysing the layout of seventy-six manuscripts, including borders, initials, paraphs, rubrics, running titles, speaker markers, glosses and notes, this thesis argues that scribes were deeply concerned with creating a manuscript page specifically to showcase texts of poetry. The introduction outlines current scholarship on mise-en-page and defines the scribe as one who offers an individual response to the text on the page within the context of the inherited, commercial, and practical practices of layout. The three analytical chapters address the placement of the features of mise-en-page in each of the seventy-six manuscripts, each chapter offering three contrasting manuscript situations. Chapter 1 analyses the manuscripts of Chaucer, who left no plan for the look of his page, causing scribes to make decisions on layout that illuminate fifteenth-century scribal responses to literature. These are then compared to the manuscripts of Gower in Chapter 2, directly or indirectly supervised by the poet, which display rigorous uniformity in their layout. This chapter argues that scribes responded in much the same way, despite the strict control over meaning. Chapter 3 focuses on Hoccleve’s autograph manuscripts which are unique in demonstrating authorial control over layout. This chapter compares the autograph to the non-autograph manuscripts to argue that scribal responses differed from authorial intentions. Each of the three chapters analyses the development of mise-en-page specifically for literary texts. Focussing on the mise-en-page, this thesis is able to compare across a range of texts, manuscripts, scribes, and authors to mount a substantial challenge to current perceptions that poetic manuscripts were laid out in order to assist readers’ understanding of the meaning of the texts they contain. Instead, it argues that though there was a concern with representing the nuances of poetic meaning, often scribal responses to poetry were bound up with presenting poetic form.

Ph.D. University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities, 2012 / This thesis studies the readership of literature that was banned under the various laws that comprised the censorship system, focusing on the apartheid period, from the 1950s until the early 1990s. It investigates the conditions under which banned and subversive literature existed in the underground network despite the ever-looming censorship apparatus. It is based on theories drawn from the history of the book, sociology of literature, South African literary histories, and on data from secondary and primary sources such as archival material and interviews with, and testimonies from, readers. This thesis focuses on the roles of readers in alternative circuits, by examining the modalities of sourcing, distributing, reading and sharing of imported and local banned publications. It seeks to demonstrate that readers did read banned books and books likely to be banned, showing creativity in the various strategies used to get these books into the country and to share them amongst the largest number of readers, using texts in various fashions, and actively participating to the South African literary industry and broader socio-political affairs.

This thesis offers the first detailed study of publishing culture in the medieval eastern Islamic world by examining how two influential anthologists active in Central Asia mediated between authors and their audiences. It analyses the contents of al-Tha'ālibī's (d. 429/1037-8) Yatīmat al-dahr, a biographical anthology of Arabic poetry and prose concerned with the literature of the 4th/10th and the early 5th/11th centuries, comparing them with the material found in 'Awfī's (d. 640/1242 or before) Lubāb al-albāb, a biographical anthology of Persian poetry focused on verse produced between the late 3rd/9th and the early 7th/13th centuries. Yatīmat al-dahr and Lubāb al-albāb are approached as ventures which aimed to render the high culture of Arabic and Persian literature accessible to readers by presenting hitherto unpublished texts in a pedagogical fashion. The thesis contributes to a current wave of research that is concerned with the history of the book in the Islamic world, but it moves the focus of such scholarship onto literary texts and their manipulation. Its principal findings can be summarised as follows: Firstly, it revises the prevalent idea that literary culture was entirely dependent on patronage, by demonstrating how market demand influenced the kinds of writing produced in the different regions of the Arabic- and Persian-speaking worlds. Patronage emerges as a force that was intertwined with the book trade, which had already begun to define conceptions of authorship. Secondly, it shows that anthologies are more than collections of exemplary texts, by uncovering how al-Tha'ālibī and 'Awfī pursue the study of society, literary history and literary theory. The anthologists did not simply reproduce extracts, but edited them in accordance with their broader intellectual projects. Lastly, it reconstructs the cosmopolitan literary culture which existed in Khurasan and Transoxiana between the 4th/10th and 7th/13th centuries, showing that many authors worked in bilingual Arabic-Persian environments, moved between Arabic and Persian spheres, and read books in both languages. The thesis is accompanied by an index of circa eight thousand poems catalogued by genre, and by an appendix which lists the material that the anthologists drew from their sources.

[pt] Esta pesquisa teve como objetivo entender tanto as práticas de leitura em dispositivos eletrônicos quanto os lugares do design na produção editorial de livros digitais. Partindo da premissa de Roger Chartier (1998) de que os suportes de leitura participam profundamente na construção de significados dos textos, procurou-se verificar as percepções dos leitores frente aos dispositivos de leitura eletrônica, mais especificamente com livros digitais interativos. Diferentemente dos livros digitais lidos em Kindle, Kobo e em outros dispositivos similares, os interativos são lidos em tablets com recursos multimídia mais avançados. Afastando-se ou não da forma do livro tradicional, a qual os primeiros livros digitais procuram simular, os livros digitais interativos abrem um novo campo para estudo, tanto da recepção quanto de sua produção. Nesse cenário, empreendemos uma pesquisa exploratória que utilizou duas técnicas principais: a pesquisa bibliográfica e o grupo focal. A literatura nos campos da história do livro, da leitura e da interação entre o livro e o suporte nos forneceram bases para se analisar as práticas de leitura, os conceitos do objeto-livro e as tecnologias. Seguindo a perspectiva dialógica de Bakhtin (2003), segundo a qual cada enunciado é um elo na corrente complexamente organizada de outros enunciados, entendemos ser frutífero articular esses dois conhecimentos: as vivências e opiniões de leitores, extraídas nos grupos focais, e as teorias e conceitos encontrados no estado da arte da pesquisa acadêmica. Ao fim, concluímos que o livro digital interativo ainda busca sua linguagem própria, num movimento constante de aproximação ou afastamento com o livro impresso. Ainda, que designer de livros digitais interativos tem papel fundamental nesse caminho da descoberta de uma linguagem, por meio de sua atuação como mediador da leitura: ele deve trabalhar não só com tecnologias e conhecimentos práticos, mas também com seu olhar voltado ao afeto e às emoções que os livros, enquanto objetos de leitura, digitais ou não, provocam nas pessoas. / [en] This research aimed to study both the reading practices in electronic devices and the design roles in the e-book production. Based on Roger Chartier s (1998) premise that the meaning of a text is deeply affected by the media in which the texts are read, we engage an analysis of readers perceptions regarding e-readers, more specifically using interactive e-books. Unlike e-books read on Kindle, Kobo and similar devices, the interactive ones are read in tablets capable of rendering more advanced multimedia resources. Whether emulating aspects of the traditional book or not, interactive e-books opens a new field for study, both of reception and production. In this scenario, we undertook an exploratory research that used two main techniques: the bibliographical research and the focal group. The literature in the fields of book history, reading, and the interaction between the reader and media has provided us a foundation to analyze reading practices, the concepts of the book as an object, and technologies. Following Bakhtin s (2003) dialogical perspective, to whom any utterance is a link in a very complexly organized chain of other utterances, we understand that it is fruitful to articulate these two knowledges: the experiences and opinions of readers drawn from focus groups, and the theories and concepts found in state-of-the-art in the academic literature. Finally, we propose that interactive e-books still seeks its own language, in a constant movement of approach or distance towards the printed book. Moreover, the interactive e-book designer plays a fundamental role in building a language, through his agency as mediator of reading: he must deal not only with technologies and practical knowledge, but also focused on affection and the emotions that books, while objects of reading, whether digital or not, causes in people.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-08-17T13:53:58Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertacao_NOE NICACIO LIMA.pdf: 2638610 bytes, checksum: 25d9e76ffa17ffb5bf1b15407cce3202 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-12-19 / Investigates the textbook titled The Maranhão (Corográficos and Historic Grants) authored by Fran Paxeco during the period from 1913 to 1923 constitutes a study in the History of Education, inserted in the approaches of historical research, incorporating the contributions of Cultural history. The aim was to study the history and production of this work in the context of school culture and its contribution in Maranhão educational setting such as textbook adopted at the Normal School, from which was propagated by printed newspapers. In addition, we sought to fill a gap in research on the history of the book in Maranhão and hence broaden the discussion on the textbook of history and geography. For the analysis of the book, Maranhão, main object and source of this research were fundamental work of Chartier (1998), Choppin (2004), Darnton (1990), Munakata (1997) and Bittencourt (1993) on the complexity of the book as a cultural object and the involvement of various professionals in their construction. Was used as source a literature review, in addition to the consultation theses and dissertations available in online databases and documents of Brazilian universities as: Laws, Decrees, Speeches and Messages Governors, Reports and Regulations of Public Instruction. Editions of newspapers were also used as: "The Pacotilha". Among the results obtained in the survey, it was found that the social position occupied by the author was instrumental in the production of your book and adoption process, especially regarding its role as Consul of Portugal in Maranhao and as teacher of the Lyceum Maranhense and Normal School . We conclude therefore that the book Maranhão was an important element in the educational scenario of Maranhão in the early twentieth century. Has grown in recent years the number of studies that take the history of the book and didactic issues as object of investigation. The field of history of education has been especially fertile ground for the development of this production, since new interests and questions began to guide the work of researchers in relation to this genre of book. It is within this context that this production work is inscribed. / Investiga-se o livro didático intitulado O Maranhão (Subsídios Históricos e Corográficos) de autoria de Fran Paxeco durante o período de 1913 a 1923. Constitui-se em um estudo de História da Educação, inserido nas abordagens da pesquisa histórica, incorporando as contribuições da História Cultural. O objetivo foi estudar a história e produção dessa obra no contexto da cultura escolar e sua contribuição no cenário educacional maranhense como livro didático adotado na Escola Normal, a partir do que foi veiculado pelos jornais impressos da época. Além disto, buscou-se preencher uma lacuna existente nas pesquisas sobre a história do livro no Maranhão e, consequentemente, ampliar as discussões sobre o livro didático de História e Geografia. Para a análise do livro, O Maranhão, principal objeto e fonte desta pesquisa, foram fundamentais os trabalhos de Chartier (1998), Choppin (2004), Darnton (1990), Munakata (1997) e Bittencourt (1993) sobre a complexidade do livro como objeto cultural e o envolvimento de diversos profissionais em sua construção. Utilizou-se como fonte uma revisão bibliográfica, além da consulta em teses e dissertações disponibilizadas nos bancos de dados online das universidades brasileiras e documentos como: Leis, Decretos, Falas e Mensagens de Governadores, Relatórios e Regulamentos da Instrução Pública. Também foram utilizadas edições dos jornais como: A Pacotilha . Dentre os resultados obtidos na pesquisa, constatou-se que o lugar social ocupado pelo autor foi decisivo no processo de produção e adoção do seu livro, sobretudo quando da sua atuação como Cônsul de Portugal no Maranhão e como professor do Liceu Maranhense e da Escola Normal. Conclui-se, portanto que o livro O Maranhão constituiu um elemento importante no cenário educacional maranhense no início do século XX. Nos últimos anos tem crescido o número de estudos que tomam a história do livro e das edições didáticas como objeto de investigação. O campo da história da educação tem sido especialmente fértil para o desenvolvimento dessa produção, uma vez que novos interesses e interrogações passaram a orientar o trabalho dos pesquisadores em relação a esse gênero de livro. É no interior desse contexto de produção que este trabalho se inscreve.

Centuries of devastating, recurrent outbreaks made the plague the archetypical disease of late medieval and early modern societies. Yet explanations of where it came from changed significantly over time. This dissertation examines how portrayals of the plague’s origins and place in society evolved separately in England and France, from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. It relies in particular on plague tracts, a long-lasting literary genre that offered standardized therapeutic and curative advice. Medical historians have studied these sources to trace the development of medical thinking and practice over time. This dissertation focuses instead on the tracts’ changing discourses about the nature of the plague that are unique to time and to place. The study elaborates a new analytical method to investigate the materiality and contents of these historical documents: it involves close reading and a codicological/bibliographical comparison of approximately 180 tracts in manuscript and printed form, set into their appropriate historical contexts. Tract producers influenced how the plague was understood locally. England’s centralised print industry fostered the idea that London was the de facto site and source of the disease; France’s diffused industry, by contrast, encouraged the discussion and tracking of outbreaks in multiple cities. Understanding of the plague’s origins also evolved: belief in malevolent celestial events gave way, in turn, to blaming unhealthy local landscapes, then the living conditions of the poor, and finally the Ottoman Empire. By the mid-seventeenth century, tract writers pointed to the Ottoman Empire as the historical and geographical source of the disease. Especially during the tumultuous sixteenth century, religious discord, dynastic factionalism, and incapable rulers also appeared in the tracts as causes and effects of the plague. Plague tracts are direct expressions and reflections of the short- and medium-term historical waves in which they appeared. It is possible to trace through them shifts in political, cultural, and intellectual worldviews. The spread of humanism in particular influenced how tract writers discussed the plague’s origins and influence in society. This study thus demonstrates that understanding disease is a cultural construct specific to time and place. Observing the unique aspects of plague tracts enhances our ability to understand the place of disease in past human societies.