This ground-breaking collection of essays presents a new 'bookish' literary history, which situates questions about books at the intersection of a range of debates about the role of authors and readers, the organization of knowledge, the vogue for collecting, and the impact of overlapping technologies of writing and shifting generic boundaries.

BARBARA M. BENEDICT, Charles A. Dana Professor of English Literature at Trinity College, USA
SIMON DURING, Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University, USA
THOMAS KEYMER, Chancellor Jackman Professor at the University of Toronto, Canada
DEIDRE LYNCH, Chancellor Jackman Professor at the University of Toronto, Canada
JON KLANCHER, Associate Professor of English and Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University, USA
MICHAEL MACOVSKI, Associate Professor at Georgetown University, USA
WILLIAM R. MCKELVY, Associate Professor of English at Washington University in Saint Louis, USA
ANDREW PIPER, Assistant Professor of German Studies at McGill University, Canada
LEAH PRICE, Professor of English at Harvard University, USA
BETTY A. SCHELLENBERG, Professor of English at Simon Fraser University, Canada

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction: Towards a Bookish Literary History; I.Ferris  & P.Keen PART ONE: RECONFIGURING LITERARY HISTORY Wild Bibliography: The Rise and Fall Book History in Nineteenth-Century Britain; J.Klancher 'Uncommon Animals': Making Virtue of Necessity in the Age of Authors; P.Keen Making Literary History in the Age of Steam; W.McKelvy PART TWO: BOOKS IN THE EVERYDAY Canons' Clockwork: Novels for Everyday Use; D.Lynch Book-Love and the Remaking of Literary Culture in the Romantic Periodical; I.Ferris The Art of Sharing: Reading in the Romantic Miscellany; A.Piper Getting the Reading Out of London Labor; L.Price PART THREE: REMAPPING THE LITERARY FIELD Reading Collections: The Literary Discourse of Eighteenth-Century Libraries; B.M.Benedict Imagining Hegel: Bookish Form and the Romantic Synopticon; M.Macovski 'The Society of Agreeable and Worthy Companions': Bookishness and Manuscript Culture after 1750; B.A.Schellenberg The Practice and Poetics of Curlism: Print, Obscenity, and the Merryland Pamphlets in the Career of Edmund Curll; T.Keymer Charlatanism and Resentment in London's Mid-Eighteenth Century Literary Marketplace; S.During Index