A cherished myth in devolved Scotland is that writers and artists were crucially responsible for the establishment of the new parliament. While there is some truth to this, understanding the full context requires looking beyond the literary texts typically viewed as pivotal in reviving national confidence. Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) certainly impacted a small literary audience, but its status as a “national” novel emerged from broader print culture networks. To appreciate its political significance, we must consider magazines like Scottish International, which published extracts of Lanark in 1969, alongside cultural periodicals like Chapman and the Edinburgh Review, which integrated Gray’s political vision into their missions during the 1980s and 90s.This chapter considers a range of Scottish political writing that contributed to this process. Here, “political writing” refers not to grand rhetoric, but to the organised creation of a neo-national public that recognised itself. It encompassed literary novels, journalism, and philosophical essays, including Tom Nairn’s work and the Red Paper on Scotland, edited by Gordon Brown (1975). The Red Paper, published by the Edinburgh University Students Publication Board (EUSPB), was connected to numerous Edinburgh-based magazines and the literary publisher Polygon. By examining this network of magazines, campaign groups, and party factions (Labour and SNP), we can identify the discursive frameworks and political alliances that led to the Scottish Parliament’s establishment in 1999, tracing much of contemporary Scottish politics back to the writing, editing, and publishing efforts of prior decades.

This chapter examines the relationship between the Conservative Party and its intellectual publications from the 1940s to the 1970s, with a focus on articles, books, and pamphlets on Conservative ideas. The 1940s were formative, as Conservatives debated the importance of political writing, ultimately leading to the establishment of the Conservative Political Centre (CPC) as the party’s in-house publisher. This allowed the Conservatives to position themselves as intellectual competitors to the Labour Party and the Fabian Society. The 1950s marked a high point, with groups like the One Nation and the Bow Group publishing influential works through the CPC, helping R. A. Butler establish a semi-independent framework for Conservative publications. However, from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, Conservative publishing became fragmented and was subjected to the ‘market test’. Under Edward Heath, a shift towards technocratic and market-oriented views weakened the CPC’s role in publishing ideological content.During the Thatcher era, Conservatives embracing neoliberalism saw the party as intellectually strong, but a shift towards relying on the publications of external think-tanks resulted in the narrowing of the field of Conservative writing and publishing.

This chapter begins its discussion of Australian poetry in the decades immediately following World War II, post-Ern Malley hoax. It identifies the impulse in major poets of this time to establish a canon of Australian poetry that reinforced a strong sense of settler identity. The chapter reflects upon this expansionary period of Australian literary culture, as evidenced by the growth of Australian publishers, literary magazines, government support for the arts, professional networks, and forums for the discussion of poetry. It considers canon-building manoeuvres in light of a deep divide between conservative and left-wing viewpoints. The role of Douglas Stewart and Beatrice Davis, and Angus & Robertson’s Australian Poets Series, is detailed. The chapter also describes the expansion of Australian literary studies as underpinned by the growth of tertiary education. It discusses how a number of poets assumed elevated university positions, encouraging scholarly accounts and criticism of poetry. Lastly, the chapter concludes that the advent of Oodgeroo’s work presented a formidable challenge to this mid century envisioning of a national canon.

This chapter considers the role of periodicals, little magazines and literary clubs in fostering communities of Australian poets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It discusses the importance of such communities in encouraging debate, circulating new poetries and encouraging generative connections between poets. The chapter discusses periodicals such as The Bulletin as a hub for what came to be known as the Bush School of poetry, and Vision that became an instrument for the poetics of the Lindsay circle. Yet it also discusses other little magazines such as The Heart of the Rose, The Triad and Stream. It considers the proliferation of literary clubs, which began as bastions of male homosociality but also began to include women writers or were for women only. It also discusses how periodicals and little magazines drew attention to and encouraged experimentation with new forms and concepts such as Symbolism and Vitalism. The chapter also includes the significance of literary magazines, some of which were supported by or emerged out of universities.

This chapter considers the history of the introduction of printing presses in northern Nigeria and demonstrates how changes in technology facilitated change both within the world of manuscript culture and within roman script book culture in Hausa. Developments in the reproduction of one form of written expression, roman script, had a radical effect upon the other, ajami (Hausa written in the Arabic script). The move from letterpress to photo-offset printing opened up a new field of reproduction for handwritten ajami and Arabic language manuscripts. The chapter traces the establishment from 1910 of the earliest letterpress in northern Nigeria, a Christian mission press. The education department of the colonial government made use of the mission press until the establishment of the Gaskiya Corporation in Zaria, intended as a training and collaborative enterprise for the production of roman script Hausa literature, along with literature in other languages of northern Nigeria.

The two possibly most-sold and most-read ‘classics’ of the postcolonial canon, such as it may be, are Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899/1902) and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958). Both have achieved bestseller status, and have been reprinted in the thousands, in iconic editions in Everyman’s, OUP’s World’s Classics, and Heinemann’s African Writers Series, not to mention Penguin. Both works have become exemplary literary commodities, extracted from their complex initial contexts of production, launched into mass-market global circulation and transformed into packaged teaching texts (often within the framework of similarly commodified anthologies) within highly normed pedagogical systems. This article takes a third mass-market paperback novel, M. J. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets (1996), to make an argument about the ways in which postcolonial texts can also be read as anti-commodities, as auratic entities that resist commodification. As such, they give rise to affective networks within which commodities are constantly accruing social use values – thereby making them co-agents in processes of subversion and revivification.

Chapter 12 discusses the potential opportunities and challenges associated with disseminating the findings of corpus-based approaches to health communication, which also apply more generally to interdisciplinary research and collaborations between researchers and non-academic stakeholders. We include two case studies. The first case study involves work on patient feedback with members of the NHS who had provided a list of questions for us to work on. We discuss the importance of and challenges around building and maintaining relationships with members of this large, changing organisation, as well as outlining how we approached dissemination of findings, both in academic and non-academic senses, and the extent that we were able to carry out impact. The second case study considers our experiences of disseminating findings from a project on metaphors and cancer, focussing particularly on writing for a healthcare journal, dealing with the media, and going beyond corpus data to create a metaphor-based resource for communication about cancer.

While exploring how specialist medical publishers and regular practitioners worked together to publish and advertise medical works on sexual matters, Chapter 3, Publishing for Professional Advantage, shows that the boundaries between communicating knowledge, promoting expertise, and trading on medical eroticism were not just blurry in contexts of the pornography trade and irregular medical practice. They were also blurry in regular medicine. Works on reproduction and sexual health issued by medical publishers were often textually similar to those issued by pornographers and irregulars, worked up using similar techniques, advertised, and distributed to non-medical readers in similar ways, and, regular practitioners often argued, for similar purposes. The chapter explores how and why these overlaps aroused particular concern among groups that advocated radical reforms to the medical profession. Rather than seeking to discipline regular medical publishing, however, reformers initially took a different route: they launched campaigns aimed at stamping out irregular practitioners’ trade in sexual health manuals.