The Printed Book in Contemporary American Culture: Medium, Object, Metaphor – eBook

The Printed Book in Contemporary American Culture, (PDF) discovers the cultural functions the printed book performs in the digital age. It explores how the use of and attitude toward the book form have transformed in light of the digital revolution of American media culture. Positioned at the crossroads of American studies, book studies, literary studies, and media studies, these essays show that a sustained concentration on the medial and material formats of literary communication considerably expands our accustomed ways of doing cultural studies. Addressing the changing roles of publishers, authors and readers while covering multiple bookish formats such as experimental fiction, artists’ books, bestselling novels, and zines, this interdisciplinary volume introduces readers to present transatlantic conversations on the past and future of the printed book.

Review

“What purpose does the printed book serve in a phase of thriving reading environments? The essays collected by Heike Schaefer and Alexander Starre brilliantly search the book’s materiality in an increasingly complex media ecology, demonstrating the ways that today’s codex both contributes to and appears from a shifting economic and cultural landscape. Along the way, the reader is stimulated to reflect how a mode of ‘medial close reading’ might open new space and copy new connections among fields including comparative literature and American studies, and also media studies and book history.” (Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English, Michigan State University, USA)

NOTE: The product includes the ebook, The Printed Book in Contemporary American Culture in PDF. No access codes are included.