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Perspectives récentes dans les études sur le livre

Anthony Glinoer
Présentation du dossier.

Recent Perspectives in Book Studies

Anthony Glinoer
Introduction to the issue.

Bibliography for All: G. Thomas Tanselle’s Descriptive Bibliography, Charlottesville: The Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 2020

Ruth-Ellen St. Onge
In this essay, the author reviews G. Thomas Tanselle’s Descriptive Bibliography (2020), a retrospective collection of essays by the influential scholar and editor who defines key concepts of descriptive bibliography while providing a methodological approach to topics including format, paper, typography and bindings of books from a range of historical periods. St. Onge singles out Tanselle’s innovations in the description of publishers’ bindings and dust jackets and identifies the essay “Format” as being representative in demonstrating Tanselle’s rigorous standards. Written over the course of several decades, some of the essays are dated, but overall, Tanselle’s work is well placed to inform the work of scholars seeking to expand the scope of descriptive bibliography, traditionally Anglo-American in focus. St. Onge concludes the review by considering the future of descriptive bibliography as a discipline.

Pearson, David, Books as History: The Importance of Books Beyond Their Texts, London: British Library, 2011. Book Ownership in Stuart England, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021

Geoffrey Robert Little
David Pearson’s 2011 work Books as History successfully argues for the study of the book as an historical actor and agent. He emphasizes that a book’s design, type, binding, and more can tell us much about the era in which a book was produced and the pressures or tensions to which it was responding. His 2021 monograph, Book Ownership in Stuart England, allows Pearson to expand on these themes by examining characteristics of book use, ownership, and circulation during a significant period of British history. Both works are situated within the ongoing debate about the book’s future in an age of digitization, in which Pearson’s framework for understanding books as material and historical actors proves a timely corrective to predictions of print’s obsolescence.

Riffaud, Alain, Une archéologie du livre français moderne, préface d’Isabelle Pantin, dessins de Paul Désiles, Genève : Droz, 2011

Nicholas Dion
Review of Une archéologie du livre français modern by Alain Riffaud

Imaginaires du livre dans la première modernité en France : Turnovsky, Geoffrey, The Literary Market, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010, et Reading Typographically, Stanford University Press 2024

Anthony Glinoer
Review of two of Geoffrey Turnovsky's books: The Literary Market and Reading Typographically

Printing Change, Changing Print: Macleod, Kirsten, American Little Magazines of the Fin de Siècle: Art, Protest, and Cultural Transformation, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018

Jay Ritchie
The review examines the contributions of Kirsten MacLeod’s American Little Magazines of the Fin de Siècle: Art, Protest, and Cultural Transformation (2018) to the fields of bibliographical studies and American literature. The role of little magazines in consolidating the interests and ideological position of an emergent professional-managerial class in the United States is presented as the book’s central thesis. Insights into the affective register of fin-de-siècle little magazines are highlighted, which are bolstered by the author’s comprehensive survey of the material. The review accentuates the judiciousness with which the author asserts her claims: rather than insist on the revolutionary nature of little magazines, MacLeod establishes how social progress was encouraged by a class of people invested in maintaining their position in society. Pointing out potential applications of MacLeod’s study to scholars of contemporary print culture, the review also highlights the author’s analysis of the relationship between other types of self-publishing and cultural formation.

Tremblay, Tony, The Fiddlehead Moment: Pioneering an Alternative Canadian Modernism in New Brunswick, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019

Eli MacLaren
The Fiddlehead (1945–), published in Fredericton at the University of New Brunswick, is the longest-running literary magazine in Canada. What were the origins of The Fiddlehead, and how did it develop so successfully? These are the questions pursued by Tony Tremblay in his monograph, The Fiddlehead Moment: Pioneering an Alternative Canadian Modernism in New Brunswick (2019). This review summarizes Tremblay’s account of the magazine, describing the education and accomplishments of the three principals behind it: Alfred Goldsworthy Bailey (1905–97), Desmond Pacey (1917–75), and Fred Cogswell (1917–2004). The Fiddlehead thrived because these founders converted the political and economic disadvantages of twentieth-century New Brunswick into an “alternative modernism” that came to a head far from the metropolitan centres of Montreal, Toronto, New York, and London. Tremblay’s book demonstrates how literature can make a place. The review applauds this scholarly accomplishment, while noting, in its scholarly method, a tension between Marxism and liberal individualism.

Letourneux, Matthieu, Fictions à la chaîne, Paris, Seuil, 2017

Marie-Pier Luneau
Published in 2017, Fictions à la chaîne: littératures sérielles et culture médiatique by Matthieu Letourneux constitutes a fundamental contribution to current understandings of mass-consumption cultural objects. By taking popular print culture into account—examined through the fourfold lens of editorial enunciation, historically dominant media formats, writing and reading practices within the genre, and their uses—the book significantly broadens critical perspectives. The article shows in particular how this work, by shifting the focus toward the serial logics at play in popular literature, has enabled it to break free—perhaps definitively—from the overly narrow framework of so-called “paraliteratures.”

Nishikawa, Kinohi, Street Players, University of Chicago Press, 2018

Philippe Néméh-Nombré
The review analyzes Kinohi Nishikawa's Street Players (2018), a book that traces the origins of black pulp fiction from the 1950s onwards. Nishikawa studies Holloway House, a publishing house run by Bentley Morriss and Ralph Weinstock. The house initially focused on sleaze but gradually shifted towards the commodification of blackness. With Iceberg Slim's Pimp (1967), the racialization of sleaze intensified, crystallizing a white fantasy around black hypermasculinity. However, the real transition to black pulp fiction came with Donald Goines, whose stories targeted an urban black readership. Nishikawa shows how Holloway House contributed to the construction of a black literary underground linked to a libidinal and racialized economy, whose circuits were reconfigured in the 1970s to reach other audiences and cultural practices. Despite the breadth of the archival work, the review regrets the limited theoretical engagement with black, feminist, and queer studies.

À l’ère de la littérature conglomérée / Sinykin, Dan, Big Fiction. How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, New York : Columbia University Press, 2023

Karol’Ann Boivin and Julien Lefort-Favreau
This article assesses the theoretical, critical, and methodological contributions of Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction. Sinykin proposes a rewriting of the history of American publishing and literary history through the lens of the concept of conglomeration in the publishing industry. The aim here is to reinstate his study of authorial and production conditions.

Childress, Clayton, Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017

Corinna Norrick-Rühl
This retrospective review examines Clayton Childress’s Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), a milestone study in the sociology of culture with significant implications for book and publishing studies. Childress traces a single work of literary historical fiction—Cornelia Nixon’s Jarrettsville (2009)—across the interconnected fields of creation, production, and reception, offering an integrated model that remains an exception in its methodological ambition. The review highlights three chapters of particular value for researchers and teachers in book studies, and situates Under the Cover within the broader interdisciplinary conversation it has helped to generate since its publication.

Nel, Philip, Was the Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature and the Need for Diverse Books, Oxford University Press, 2017

Sophie Heywood
This essay focuses on Philip Nel’s 2017 study Was the Cat in the Hat Black?, a landmark book in children’s literary and publishing studies. It demonstrates both the intellectual influence of critical race theory on contemporary thinking in the field, and bears witness to the intensification of attacks on the movement to promote children’s access to diverse books, and the scholarship that underpins it. In this presentation of his book, I set it in the context of research by scholars of colour and by white researchers such as Nel into the issue of racism in children’s books. Specifically, Nel’s book lays bare the unspoken white privilege that he argues structures so much of US-American children’s literature, and the “hidden racism” that it produces in children’s literature. Nel shows us how vast swathes of the English-language children’s literary canon is steeped in racist thought and traditions – including of course, Dr. Seuss’s iconic creation, The Cat in the Hat. The book’s recent reception history bears witness to the seismic shifts the newly-powerful and highly-organized extreme conservative right is causing the US children’s book world.

Thompson, John B., Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge: Polity, 2010

Laura B. McGrath
John B. Thompson’s Merchants of Culture is routinely cited as the most in-depth and influential examination of the US literary publishing industry in the twenty-first century. This article examines Thompson’s research and impact nearly 15 years after its initial publication. It considers its uses for researchers at present—both Thompson’s thoroughness, and areas of oversight. Considering Merchants of Culture from 2026, this article surfaces many of the questions that Thompson raised that are still to be addressed by researchers in the coming years.

Suivre le mot à la trace : track Changes de M. G. Kirschenbaum, Harvard : Harvard University Press, 2016

Margot Mellet
This review concerns Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, a book written by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum (University of Maryland) and published in 2016. By retracing the work of Kirschenbaum, which offers a literary archaeology of a technology now common in writing practices, and presenting its structure as the review’s key concepts (materiality of writing, being digital), the review aims to encourage readers to read the book itself and to promote new ways of thinking about word processing.