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74 results in Cambridge Elements

Page 1 of 4

The Form and Theory of Literary Doodling

The Form and Theory of Literary Doodling
  • Jeremiah R. Mercurio, Daniel Gabelman
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    February 2025
    Print publication:
    28 February 2025
  • This Element investigates the phenomenon of literary doodling—the making of playful verbal and visual creations by professional authors while engaged in another activity. The first part focuses on defining the form and structure of doodles, comparing and contrasting them with adjacent genres such as sketches, caricatures, and illustrations. The second part explores the modality of doodling, examining doodles through the lenses of spectrality, liminality, and play. Drawing on a wide range of theories and backed up with numerous close readings, the Element argues that doodles, despite their apparent triviality, provide valuable insights into the creative processes, authorial habits, and finished works of literary doodlers. Ultimately, this study aims to legitimise doodles as worthy of serious critical attention, demonstrating how they trouble the meaning of texts, introduce semantic flexibility into literary works and their reception, and rejuvenate the joy of readerly discovery.
Printing Technologies and Book Production in Seventeenth-Century Japan

Printing Technologies and Book Production in Seventeenth-Century Japan
Mudie's Select Library and the Shelf Life of the Nineteenth–Century Novel

Mudie's Select Library and the Shelf Life of the Nineteenth–Century Novel
  • Karen Wade
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2025
    Print publication:
    31 January 2025
  • Mudie's Select Library was a major nineteenth-century literary institution. Substantially larger than its competitors, the library leveraged regional and global distribution networks and close commercial ties with publishers which allowed it to maintain a key position within the British publishing industry. In its heyday, it was widely believed that novelists and publishers were required to conform to aesthetic, moral and formal standards established by Mudie's, or risk the rejection and consequent failure of their books. However, the lack of a comprehensive study of the library's holdings leaves open questions about what the library actually stocked, and to what extent the library could determine a novel's fate. This Element describes a data analysis of a collection of Mudie's catalogues spanning eighty years, in order to reassess understandings of the library's role in the nineteenth-century publishing industry. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Unprinted

Unprinted
  • Publication Beyond the Press
  • Daria Kohler, Daniel Wakelin, Natascha Domeisen, Daniel Haywood, Edward Jones, Micah Mackay, Rosie Maxton, Brian M. Moore, Katie Noble, Felix M. Simon, Daniel Wojahn
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2025
    Print publication:
    31 January 2025
  • This Element explores the idea of publication in media used before, alongside, and after print. It contrasts multiple traditions of unprinted communication in their diversity and particularity. This decentres print as the means for understanding publication; instead, publication is seen as an heuristic term which identifies activities these traditions share, but which also differ in ways not reducible to comparisons with printing. The Element engages with texts written on papyrus, chiselled in stone, and created digitally; sung, proclaimed, and put on stage; banned, hidden and rediscovered. The authors move between Greek inscriptions and Tibetan edicts, early modern manuscripts and AI-assisted composition, monasteries and courts, constantly questioning the term 'publication' and considering the agency of people publishing and the publics they address. The picture that transpires is that of a colourful variety of contexts of production and dissemination, underlining the value of studying 'unprinted' publication in its own right.
Libraries and the Academic Book

Libraries and the Academic Book
  • Matthew J. Shaw
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2024
    Print publication:
    31 December 2024
  • This Element explores the history of the relationship between libraries and the academic book. It provides an overview of the development of the publishing history of the scholarly - or academic - book, and related creation of the modern research library. It argues that libraries played an important role in the birth and growth of the academic book, and explores how publishers, readers and libraries helped to develop the format and scholarly and publishing environments that now underpin contemporary scholarly communications. It concludes with an appraisal of the current state of the field and how business, technology and policy are mapping a variety of potential routes to the future.
Behaviour Beyond the Text and the Morality Clause in Twenty-First-Century Publishing

Behaviour Beyond the Text and the Morality Clause in Twenty-First-Century Publishing
  • Chiara Bullen
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2024
    Print publication:
    31 December 2024
  • A morality clause allows contracting parties to terminate a contractual agreement with those who exhibit behaviour deemed unacceptable. Established in 1920s Hollywood, these contractual clauses are now found in twenty-first-century publishing agreements. This Element investigates the presence of the morality clause in the UK book publishing industry in relation to an increased focus on author behaviour beyond the text in the twenty-first-century, examining the way it operates within the publishing field in the context of behaviour perceived to be 'problematic'. It asserts the clause is perceived to be needed due to the emergence of social media and twenty-first-century social contexts combining to impact the author-reader relationship which, in turn, leads to author behaviour acting as a paratextual threshold to their work. This Element presents an analysis of the morality clause in practice, concluding the clause has the potential to further the power imbalance between author and publisher.
Selling Books with Algorithms

Selling Books with Algorithms
  • Anna Muenchrath
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2024
    Print publication:
    28 November 2024
  • In 1997 Amazon started as a small online bookseller. It is now the largest bookseller in the US and one of the largest companies in the world, due, in part, to its implementation of algorithms and access to user data. This Element explains how these algorithms work, and specifically how they recommend books and make them visible to readers. It argues that framing algorithms as felicitous or infelicitous allows us to reconsider the imagined authority of an algorithm's recommendation as a culturally situated performance. It also explores the material effects of bookselling algorithms on the forms of labor of the bookstore. The Element ends by considering future directions for research, arguing that the bookselling industry would benefit from an investment in algorithmic literacy.
Old Delhi's Parallel Book Bazaar

Old Delhi's Parallel Book Bazaar
  • Kanupriya Dhingra
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2024
    Print publication:
    28 November 2024
  • This Element looks at Old Delhi's Daryaganj Sunday Book Market, popularly known as Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar, as a parallel location for books and a site of resilience and possibilities. The first section studies the bazaar's spatiality - its location, relocation, and respatialisation. Three actors play a major role in creating and organising this spatiality: the sellers, the buyers, and the civic authorities. The second section narrativizes the biographies of the booksellers of Daryaganj to offer a map of the hidden social and material networks that support the informal modes of bookselling. Amidst order and chaos, using their specialised knowledge, Daryaganj booksellers create distinctive mechanisms to serve the diverse reading public of Delhi. Using ethnography, oral interviews, and rhythmanalysis, this Element tells a story of urban aspirations, state-citizen relations, official and unofficial cultural economies, and imaginations of other viable worlds of being and believing.
Innovations in Digital Comics

Innovations in Digital Comics
  • A Popular Revolution
  • Francesca Benatti
  • Published online:
    03 September 2024
    Print publication:
    03 October 2024
    • Element
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  • The success of popular webcomics (comics produced and read entirely digitally) is the greatest revolution in the comics medium of the last two decades. Webcomics exploit a socio-technical convergence between digital platforms and participatory cultures, enabling global authors to work together with global audiences to transcend established print comics structures. After defining digital comics, webcomics and webtoons, this Element presents a case study of Korean platform WEBTOON, which achieved 100 billion global page views in 2019. The study analyses data from their website, including views, subscriptions and likes, to quantify and assess whether WEBTOON's commercial and critical success is connected to its inclusion of a wider range of genres and of a more diverse author base than mainstream English-language print comics. In so doing, it performs the first Book Historical study of webcomics and webtoons. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
YA Anthologies

YA Anthologies
  • Amplifying Voices, Building Community
  • Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
  • Published online:
    07 June 2024
    Print publication:
    27 June 2024
  • Despite their long publishing history, anthologies have received little scholarly attention. However, they play an important role in collecting, and reflecting upon, voices and identities that have all-to-often been on the fringes of publishing. This Element explores the sociocultural functions of anthologies in relation to discussions around exclusion/inclusion in the publishing industry. Focusing on YA anthologies, using a case study of A Change Is Gonna Come anthology (2017), this Element argues that the form and function of anthologies allows them to respond to and represent changing ideas of socially-marginalised identities. In A Change Is Gonna Come, this medium also affords Black and Brown authors a platform and community for introspection and the development of both individual and collective identities. Beyond merely introducing writings by socially-marginalised groups, this Element contends that YA anthologies embody a form of literary activism, fostering community-building and offering a means to circumvent obstacles prevalent in publishing.
China's eBook Evolution

China's eBook Evolution
  • Disruptive Models and Emerging Book Cultures
  • Xiang Ren
  • Published online:
    23 May 2024
    Print publication:
    13 June 2024
  • This Element explores the changing landscape of eBook businesses and cultures in China in the past two decades and examines how disruptive innovation and the platform economy have transformed one of the world's largest book markets. Through an evolutionary perspective, this Element documents and analyses the emergence, growth, and refinement of disruptive models in three areas of trade publishing, including free eBook developments, digital self-publishing, and platformed social reading. It offers a critical account of the complex interplay between emerging technologies, business innovations, and book cultures and conceptualises China's eBook evolution as both a part of global digital publishing transformation in the platform age and an embodiment of local dynamics in a transitional society. This Element is essential for scholars, students, publishers, and the interested publics to understand China's digital publishing innovations and their global implications.
Space, Place, and Bestsellers

Space, Place, and Bestsellers
  • Moving Books
  • Lisa Fletcher, Elizabeth Leane
  • Published online:
    17 May 2024
    Print publication:
    13 June 2024
  • From airport bookstores to deckchairs, as audiobooks downloaded by commuters, and on Kindles and other portable devices, twenty-first century bestsellers move in old and new ways. This Element examines the locations and mobilities of the contemporary bestseller as a multi-format commercial object. It employs paratextual, textual, and site-based analysis of the spatiality of bestsellers and considers the centrality of geography to the commercial promise of these books. Space, Place, and Bestsellers provides analysis of the spatial logic of bestseller lists, evidence-rich accounts of the physical and digital retail sites through which bestsellers flow, and new interpretations of how affixing the label 'bestseller' individual authors and titles generates industrial, social, and textual effects. Through its multi-layered analysis, this Element offers a new model for studying the spatiality of popular fiction.
International Bestsellers and the Online Reconfiguring of National Identity

International Bestsellers and the Online Reconfiguring of National Identity
  • Rachel Noorda, Millicent Weber, Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
  • Published online:
    03 May 2024
    Print publication:
    23 May 2024
  • International bestsellers are the ideal sites for examining the complicated relationship between literary culture and national identity. Despite the transnational turns in both literary studies and book history, place is still an important configurer of twenty-first-century book reception. Books are crucial to national identity and catalysts of nationalist movements. On an individual level, books enable readers to shape and maintain their own national identities. This Element explores how contemporary readers' understandings of nation, race/ethnicity, gender, and class continue to shape their reading, using as case studies the online reception of three bestseller titles-Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies (Australia), Zadie Smith's NW (UK), and Kevin Kwan's Crazy Rich Asians (USA). In doing so, this Element demonstrates the need for and articulates a transnational conceptualisation of the relationship between reader identity and reception.
Bot-mimicry in Digital Literary Culture

Bot-mimicry in Digital Literary Culture
  • Imitating Imitative Software
  • Malthe Stavning Erslev
  • Published online:
    03 May 2024
    Print publication:
    30 May 2024
  • This Element traverses the concept and practice of bot mimicry, defined as the imitation of imitative software, specifically the practice of writing in the style of social bots. Working as both an inquiry into and an extended definition of the concept, the Element argues that bot mimicry engenders a new mode of knowing about and relating to imitative software – as well as a distinctly literary approach to rendering and negotiating artificial intelligence imaginaries. The Element presents a software-oriented mode of understanding Internet culture, a novel reading of Alan Turing's imitation game, and the first substantial integration of Walter Benjamin's theory of the mimetic faculty into the study of digital culture, thus offering multiple unique lines of inquiry. Ultimately, the Element illuminates the value of mimicry – to the understanding of an emerging practice of digital literary culture, to practices of research, and to our very conceptions of artificial intelligence.
Young Adult Literature

Young Adult Literature
  • Transmedia Transformations
  • Sarah Mygind
  • Published online:
    24 November 2023
    Print publication:
    21 December 2023
  • Young adult literature is often referred to as the originating source for film adaptations that turn into large transmedia storyworlds and franchises. This is, however, only one of the transmedia interactions involving young adult literature in modern culture. This Element unfolds these relations focusing on transmedia practices that bridge the dominant public discursive split between print based and digital media. Today print and digital products work together as well as independently in interconnected networks and these practices puncture ideas of a media hierarchy. Specifically, it is demonstrated how literature for young people take part in transmedia storytelling on a macro level but also in so-called cluster works that work as transmedia storytelling on a micro level.
Communicating the News in Early Modern Europe

Communicating the News in Early Modern Europe
  • Jenni Hyde, Massimo Rospocher, Joad Raymond, Yann Ryan, Hannu Salmi, Alexandra Schäfer-Griebel
  • Published online:
    23 November 2023
    Print publication:
    14 December 2023
  • This history of early modern news focuses on news itself rather than specific material forms. Centering on movement through different media, time, and place, it makes the case for a truly comparative, pan-European history of news. After the Introduction, the second section, News Moves, explores how we think about and research news culture and news communication, demonstrating movement is more important than static forms. The third, News Sings, focuses on news ballads, comparing actors, publics, music, and soundscapes of ballad singing in several European cities, highlighting the central role of immaterial elements, such as sound, music and voice. The fourth, News Counts, argues that seeing news the way a machine might read it—through its metadata—is one way of moving beyond form, allowing us to find surprising commonalities in news cultures which differ greatly in both time and place.
Space as Language

Space as Language
  • The Properties of Typographic Space
  • Will Hill
  • Published online:
    10 August 2023
    Print publication:
    24 August 2023
  • This Element examines the function and significance of typographic space. It considers in turn the space within letters, the space between letters, the space between lines, and the margin space surrounding the text-block, to develop the hypothesis that viewed collectively these constitute a 'metalanguage' complementary to the text. Drawing upon critical perspectives from printing, typeface design, typography, avant-garde artistic practice and design history, the Element examines the connotative values and philosophies embodied in the form and disposition of space. These include the values attributed to symmetry and asymmetry, the role of 'active' space in the development of modernist typography, the debated relationship between type and writing, the divergent ideologies of the printing industry and the letter arts, and the impact of successive technologies upon both the organisation and the perception of typographic space.
Publishing in a Medieval Monastery

Publishing in a Medieval Monastery
  • The View from Twelfth-Century Engelberg
  • Benjamin Pohl
  • Published online:
    06 July 2023
    Print publication:
    03 August 2023
  • This Element contributes to the burgeoning field of medieval publishing studies with a case study of the books produced at the Benedictine monastery of Engelberg under its celebrated twelfth-century abbot, Frowin (1143–78). Frowin was the first abbot of Engelberg whose book provision policy relied on domestic production serviced by an internal scribal workforce, and his tenure marked the first major expansion of the community's library. This Element's in-depth discussion of nearly forty colophons inscribed in the books made for this library during Frowin's transformative abbacy offers a fresh perspective on monastic publishing practice in the twelfth century by directing our view to a mode of publication that has received only limited attention in scholarship to date.
Authorship and Publishing in the Humanities

Authorship and Publishing in the Humanities
  • Marcel Knöchelmann
  • Published online:
    05 July 2023
    Print publication:
    03 August 2023
  • What is the point of publishing in the humanities? This Element provides an answer to this question. It builds on a unique set of quantitative and qualitative data to understand why humanities scholars publish. It looks at both basic characteristics such as publication numbers, formats, and perceptions, and differences of national academic settings alongside the influences of the UK's Research Excellence Framework and the German Exzellenzinitiative. The data involve a survey of more than 1,000 humanities scholars and social scientists in the UK and Germany, allowing for a comprehensive comparative study, and a series of qualitative interviews. The resulting critique provides scholars and policy makers with an accessible and critical work about the particularities of authorship and publishing in the humanities. And it gives an account of the problems and struggles of humanities scholars in their pursuit of contributing to discourse, and to be recognised with their intellectual work.
The Early Development of Project Gutenberg c.1970–2000

The Early Development of Project Gutenberg c.1970–2000
  • Simon Rowberry
  • Published online:
    15 June 2023
    Print publication:
    29 June 2023
  • Project Gutenberg is lauded as one of the earliest digitisation initiatives, a mythology that Michael Hart, its founder perpetuated through to his death in 2011. In this Element, the author re-examines the extant historical evidence to challenge some of Hart's bolder claims and resituates the significance of Project Gutenberg in relation to broader trends in online document delivery and digitisation in the latter half of the twentieth century, especially in the World Wide Web's first decade (the 1990s). Through this re-appraisal, the author instead suggests that Hart's Project is significant as an example of what Millicent Weber has termed a “digital publishing collective” whereby a group of volunteers engage in producing content and that process is as meaningful as the final product.

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