Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 The Memory and Impact of Oral Performance: Shaping the Understanding of Late Medieval Readers
- 2 Print, Miscellaneity and the Reader in Robert Herrick's Hesperides
- 3 Searching for Spectators: From Istoria to History Painting
- 4 Returning to the Text of Frankenstein
- 5 ‘Casualty’, Mrs Shelley and Seditious Libel: Cleansing Britain's Most Corrupt Poet of Error
- 6 Writing Textual Materiality: Charles Clark, his Books and his Bookplate Poem
- 7 Charles Dickens's Readers and the Material Circulation of the Text
- 8 Victorian Pantomime Libretti and the Reading Audience
- 9 Material Modernism and Yeats
- 10 Changing Audiences: The Case of the Penguin Ulysses
- 11 The Sound of Literature: Secondary School Teaching on Reading Aloud and Silent Reading, 1880–1940
- 12 Intermediality: Experiencing the Virtual Text
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
10 - Changing Audiences: The Case of the Penguin Ulysses
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 The Memory and Impact of Oral Performance: Shaping the Understanding of Late Medieval Readers
- 2 Print, Miscellaneity and the Reader in Robert Herrick's Hesperides
- 3 Searching for Spectators: From Istoria to History Painting
- 4 Returning to the Text of Frankenstein
- 5 ‘Casualty’, Mrs Shelley and Seditious Libel: Cleansing Britain's Most Corrupt Poet of Error
- 6 Writing Textual Materiality: Charles Clark, his Books and his Bookplate Poem
- 7 Charles Dickens's Readers and the Material Circulation of the Text
- 8 Victorian Pantomime Libretti and the Reading Audience
- 9 Material Modernism and Yeats
- 10 Changing Audiences: The Case of the Penguin Ulysses
- 11 The Sound of Literature: Secondary School Teaching on Reading Aloud and Silent Reading, 1880–1940
- 12 Intermediality: Experiencing the Virtual Text
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Introduction
A book is a machine for generating meaning; the material form of the book itself contributes to the creation of meaning and, in so doing, shapes the reader. Often statements like this are produced as if the book historian or textual critic were discovering new truths rather than restating shared knowledge in a new vocabulary. The Royal Engineers conducting the Ordnance Survey in Brian Friel's Translations (1981) rename the places of Donegal; they give the authority of print and lend the status of officialdom to the new names. Yet the people of Donegal have known, and worked and lived in, these places for countless years under their original names. Publishers, who take the decisions about the material form that the text will take, can be relegated to the same status. Their role in making calculated and calculating judgements is ignored in the renaming of paratext and in the analysis of its generation or qualification of meaning. This essay attempts to reinstate publishers as active agents in making books and shaping readers, through a case study of the 1969 Penguin edition of Ulysses.
The establishment of Joyce's novel in the academy in the UK, the essay will argue, was a deliberate result of the marketing of that 1969 paperback edition, Penguin number 3,000. The date is significant.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Readings on Audience and Textual Materiality , pp. 131 - 142Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014