The Unfinished Book

This collection is founded on the premise that the physical book is far from exhausted as informational medium, art object, or conceptual resource. The contributors to The Unfinished Book identify the many ways in which study of books -- of their compounding of matter and meaning, of their global travels and historical transitions, of their shaping of and by new media technologies -- remains unfinished business for humanist scholarship generally, and literary studies in particular. The collection's 32 chapters demonstrate in tandem how much book history has to gain in turn from engaging the most vital and innovative literary-critical modes of the 21st-century. Book studies thus intersects here with scholarship on empire, the environment, disability, and affect, as well as with work in African-American and Indigenous studies. Literary study is uniquely positioned, this collection asserts, to honour books' distinctive ways of both meaning things and being things.

The chapters span a terrain that extends from the earliest surviving writings of the Indus Valley to Cicero's 1st-century B.C.E. library to the latest videogames. Some model new ways of thinking about the form, edges, and boundaries of the book as they demonstrate how seldom the book's history as a material object is terminated at the moment of its manufacture. Other chapters highlight the provisionality that makes the book's conceptual boundaries fuzzy, unfinished, and variable; many seek to overturn triumphalist histories that recount the story of the book as though it were Western and white. Overall, this collection launches a new generation of scholarship as it introduces provocative new approaches about the nature, place, and time of books.


Author: Alexandra Gillespie
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 02/07/2021
Pages: 528
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 2.51lbs
Size: 9.90h x 7.30w x 1.40d
ISBN: 9780198830801


Review Citation(s):
Choice 03/01/2022

About the Author

Alexandra Gillespie, Professor of English and Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, Deidre Lynch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of English Literature, Harvard University

Alexandra Gillespie is Professor of English at the University of Toronto and a member of Toronto's Collaborative Program in Book History and Print Culture and its Centre for Medieval Studies. At Toronto Gillespie also directs the Mellon Foundation-supported Old Books New Science Laboratory. Her
publications include Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and their Books (Oxford, 2006) and, as co-editor, The Production of Books in England, 1350-1500 (Cambridge, 2011). A new monograph, Chaucer's Books, is forthcoming in 2021.

Deidre Lynch is Ernest Bernbaum Professor of English Literature at Harvard. Her numerous publications on eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century literature, culture, and reading communities include Loving Literature: A Cultural History (Chicago, 2015), The Economy of Character: Novels,
Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago, 1998), as editor, Janeites: Austen's Disciples and Devotees (Princeton, 2000) and, as co-editor, Cultural Institutions of the Novel (Duke, 1996). She is currently completing Paper Slips: Disassembling and Remaking the Book.