The introduction situates political writing and publishing as vital tools in articulating, disseminating, and shaping political movements and ideas in modern Britain. It explores the diversity of political genres, from elite forms such as parliamentary novels and newspaper obituaries to grassroots expressions such as punk fanzines and coalfield women’s writing. It highlights how ‘high political’ and subaltern voices respectively engaged with political writing, sometimes to reinforce dominant narratives and at other times to challenge or subvert them. It examines the gendered politics of authorship, particularly how women and marginalised groups used writing to claim authority and reshape the boundaries of political discourse. Attention is given to the role of literature and publishing in mediating the intersections of culture and politics, from fascist propaganda and socialist poetry to the intellectual infrastructure of devolved Scotland and Northern Ireland. By contextualizing political writing within broader historical and cultural transformations, the introduction positions the chapters of the book as a series of ‘core samples’ that reveal the relationships between genre, ideology, and activism.

The introduction sets out the history of the establishment of the British Museum and the subsequent creation of the British Library as a separate institution. It goes on to explore book collections in the early modern period, referring to writings by Edmund Spenser, Thomas Browne, and Francis Bacon. It argues that the library has never been defined as a place where books are wholly set apart and that they should instead be seen as part of wider collections. It looks at the place of books within cabinets of curiosity, arguing that books both belong in and yet are still somehow different from wider collections. Finally, it argues that the distinction of a book from an object can be unwieldy and dependent on the reader. It ends by proposing that Hans Sloane’s collection is the ideal place to think through what an institutional library is, and what it means to use books.

This chapter tells the story of how the uncensored text of Pepys’s diary was finally published in the late twentieth century, before turning to the diary’s online presence in the twenty-first century. The complete text, edited by Latham and Matthews, appeared between 1970 and 1983. However, the decision to publish the diary in full was made much earlier, at the time of the controversial Lady Chatterley trial (1960). Getting all the diary into print required navigating the new law against obscene publications, with implications for how the diary is read today. International collaboration – and behind-the-scenes controversy – also shaped this edition. Collaboration is likewise a feature of the site pepysdiary.com (2003-present), which attracts an international community of readers. As the COVID-19 pandemic hit, this site became a record of how readers worldwide used Pepys’s history to interpret a contemporary plague.

Before his conversion to Roman Catholicism, Hopkins acquired a copy of the Vulgate Latin Bible for future use and returned his copy of the King James Bible to his unhappy father. From a Bible-centred Protestant perspective, much of the doctrine on which he was to meditate as a Jesuit poet is non-scriptural, and could be described as Catholic accretions. This chapter reveals that Catholic versions of the Bible underwent revision down the centuries, as Protestant versions did, and that Victorian Catholics were not forbidden to read the Bible. A new Holy Catholic Bible is adorned with an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary in glory. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary was promulated in 1854, further widening the gap between Protestant and Catholic teaching. But for Hopkins, the unpublished laureate of the Blessed Virgin, the (unscriptural) Immaculate Conception lay at the heart of his faith.

This chapter provides an overview of manga usage in Japan. First, it traces the contours of the production side and the historic structuring function of print magazines, as well as their connections to anime. Second, the chapter delves into readership, consumption, and use. Issues of agency make room for a discussion of publications produced and distributed outside official commercial channels but in dialogue with them, and the Comic Market as their biggest sales-spot event. Third, the chapter exposes how different standards of regulation allowed eroticism to spread throughout manga and related media and material forms in Japan. Assumptions about consumption are unsettled through the example of Weekly Shōnen Jump, even as assumptions about production are disrupted through the suggestion that women are the majority of erotic manga artists today. Final thoughts are given on friction in the global circulation and reception of manga, which presents both challenges and opportunities for manga studies specifically and comics studies generally.

The Introduction offers an analysis of the poem’s proem to offer a first example of the methodology of the book and of Statius’ sophisticated engagement with Ovid. A discussion of the historical context in which the poem was composed warns readers about the risks of interpreting the Thebaid only in the light of the anti-Domitianic writings of Tacitus, Suetonius, and Pliny, suggesting the importance of non-literary and material sources. A critical overview of the scholarly debate on the Thebaid and the exploration of ancient reading habits – including the consideration of attestations of Ovidian stories in frescoes and monuments – suggests that intertextuality can consist of interactions of meanings (potentially independent of verbal allusions). Furthermore, texts can engage in dialogue with the semantics of both textual and non-textual narratives. Accordingly, the introduction suggests that the study of the Thebaid’s poetics and politics (broadly understood) involves the exploration of how different kinds of intertextual and intermedial interplays shape the poem’s engagement with both past literary models and the contemporary realities of Flavian Rome.

This chapter begins with the little magazines of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and ends with contemporary online literary magazines, highlighting the radical changes that have taken place as print yielded to digital culture. Motivated by the contrarian personalities of their founding editors against commercial tastes, small-circulation periodicals prioritized aesthetic experimentation and established themselves as an avant-garde force in the arts. During the twentieth century, literary magazines would become institutionalized and relinquish their financial and intellectual independence. Their avant-garde status, once represented by a collectively upheld editorial persona, would become overshadowed by individual cults of personality around popular writers. Magazines’ social programs would become watered down, and instead writers would make themselves into social actors. The arrival of New Journalism in the 1960s and ’70s radically changed long-form journalism, rendering it more literary. The chapter ends with the contemporary literary magazine ecosystem, showing that what magazines have lost in materiality, they have gained in generic hybridity and global access.

Pater’s individual volumes of essays were republished and reprinted many times in the years following his death. The books passed from hand to hand, and entered the second-hand market, often featuring brief inscriptions which indicate that they were proffered as gifts, in addition to more revealing marks of ownership comprising underlinings and marginal annotations. This postscript considers a small sample of such books, helpful in illustrating the diversity and orientation of Pater’s posthumous readership. Ranging from an early copy of Appreciations bought as a schoolboy by an eminent English scholar to a pocket edition of the same work presented to a prospective Oxford student, these books testify to the continuing appeal of Pater’s writings. An underlying theme to be followed is the vexed question of Pater’s perceived relevance to the study of English literature while the subject itself was acquiring its institutional framework in British universities. Some indications of Pater’s American readership, and his appeal to the more flexible curricula of the ‘new universities’ of the 1960s, are also relevant to the context under consideration here.

This chapter introduces important distinctions between intended and actual readership, and between the early novels, the ‘sophistic’ novels, and other known novels. It concludes that both the intended and actual readers of ‘sophistic’ novels were from the educated elite, and that Chariton probably envisaged such readers too, while perhaps writing in such as way that readers might also be found further down the social scale. Readers of this sort may also have been envisaged by Xenophon and some other writers of fiction, but in no case much further down.

This chapter is an introduction, addressing some preliminary issues: (a) the readership of this book; (b) the long history of the Chinese language as a natural laboratory in testing hypotheses in linguistics, human cognition, and civilization; (c) the periodization of the Chinese language; (d) the selection of historical texts; and (e) the structure of this book.

Louise McReynolds considers what it was like for Chekhov as young writer amid the increasingly diverse readerships, publishers, and editorial boards of his time, and how his writing developed in response to the state censorship apparatus and to the media outlets, both popular and “prestige,” that constituted a newly emergent commercial press.

Tolstoy, himself a polyglot, is one of the world’s most widely translated writers, with at least ten English versions of War and Peace and a good thirteen of Anna Karenina, not to mention multiple translations of the shorter works and philosophical and religious treatises. The diversity of the English Tolstoy corpus makes it impossible to come up with a clear ranking of translations based on quality. Certain unique features of the writer’s language pose particular challenges to translators, such as his tendency to repeat simple, morally loaded words at key moments; his omissions of words that usually need to be supplied in English; and the complexity of his nature descriptions. English translations of Tolstoy’s works have flowed in two parallel streams, one on each side of the Atlantic. Louise and Aylmer Maude produced the most sustained and authoritative body of Tolstoy translations. The twentieth century has seen new trends: Tolstoy’s works have become easily available on the Internet both in Russian and in English; Russia offers generous grant support to fund translations of classic Russian literature; and a new authoritative Academy collected works is underway, which will surely necessitate revisions of translations, or production of new ones.

The Introduction provides an overview of the book and explains its rationale, main goals, and research questions. It presents how the book is organised and its target readership.

Long understood as purifying the church by rejecting worship routine and devotional ceremony, pious New England settlers in fact observed formal and informal rituals that defined lived religion within the Reformed tradition. Given that access to the vernacular word was central to puritan self-definition, literacy and reading became intensely ritualized. Thus, along with life-cycle rites (birth, marriage, death), annual and occasional ceremonies (fast days, thanksgiving days, election sermons, artillery sermons), and sabbath customs (the sacraments, the public confession, the audition of preaching), ritual was derived from the experience of books. The chapter demonstrates this experience by looking at moments of cross-cultural contact during Metacom’s War, where reading seeks to stabilize tradition. It studies reader annotations of devotional works as a means to understand the meditative, recursive, and extractive practices that grounded and routinized lay piety. And it examines the visual iconography of illustrations within devotional manuals, illustrations that idealize and demonize kinds of identity for the proper pilgrim reader. Ritual, routine, and iconography are not typically associated with puritan worship, but with an ear and eye to reading habits, we better understand experiential religion in early New England.

If readers determine the fate of books, we might think the Annals of Quintus Ennius enjoyed but ephemeral success. Its fragments are few, its original audience and intent unclear. In this paper I ask how so vast a monument became such a ruin, and what the evidence of its survival reveals about the process of its destruction. Those who knew the poem best are among that handful of Romans – Cicero and Vergil prominent among them – whom we know best. What did “ordinary” Romans know, pretend to know, or could they be expected to know of it? Close attention to the poem’s reception suggests that it was best known through favored extracts and that the idea of the Annals was more firmly fixed in the Roman literary consciousness than the poem itself.

This paper investigates the largely inaccessible ancient audiences of early Roman epic and historiography, using points of intersection in our evidence for Ennius’ Annals and Cato’s Origins to consider each work’s audience in relation to the other’s. My means of approach are two. First, I explore differences in how Cicero responds to each of those works, with glances across to his surviving responses to Fabius Pictor’s history of Rome, finding that Cicero frequently cites the Annals to illustrate the forging and articulation of Roman ethical identity at exemplary moments in the past, but neither he nor any other source cites Cato or Fabius for any such purpose. Second, I consider the distribution of collectives across the surviving fragments of both works. Terms for the Roman collective are relatively abundant in Ennius’ Annals, and that collective is featured in heroic action, but in the Origins the Roman collective is much less obtrusive than might have been expected in a work notorious for suppressing the names of more recent historical leaders. The two findings suggest that it was the Annals that had the broader appeal, the readier ability to speak to and for Romans across the board.

The introduction discusses the interrelated notions of translation and reception and introduces the main topic of the book: namely, the ways in which vernacular readers appropriated the legacy of Aristotle in Italy between 1250 and 1500. Given the deep-rooted and widespread presence of Aristotle in medieval and Renaissance culture, the vernacular reception of the philosopher’s works offers a productive lens through which to reconsider the proactive role of translation in the construction and refinement of communicative tools able to disseminate the philosophical tradition among wider communities of readers. As such, the introduction reflects on the cultural implications of the theory and practice of vernacular translation in the period, arguing that its function is better understood when considered as part of a wide-ranging reception process involving not only the translators, but also their readers, who, in various ways, contribute actively to the process itself.

“Wharton and the Romance Plot” describes the relationship among three of Wharton’s novels that are heavily indebted to romance conventions – The House of Mirth, The Reef, and Summer. The failure of each narrative to reach the happy ending of a wished-for marriage provides readers with one means of questioning the actions of each pair of carefully drawn characters: is the absence of a fairy-tale ending the fault of Lily or Selden? Anna or George? Charity or Lucius? As Wharton changes the conventions of romance, she asks the reader to do a different kind of reading, a more socially based critique, one dependent on expectations by gender. Literary history seems to have prejudiced readers against Wharton’s early women characters, yet Henry James saw all too clearly how noble Anna Leathe was. With Lily Bart dead, and Charity Royall summarily wed, the fact that Anna wins the lover she desires breaks the often-cliched romance plot in her favor.

‘Archive’ and ‘scholarly edition’ are not securely differentiated categories. As readers we inhabit the same textual field as the documents and texts we seek to define. To record is to read and analyse sufficiently for the archival purpose; to interpret, for the editorial purpose: i.e. to mount an argument about the archival materials directed at a readership. The archival impulse anticipates the editorial, and the editorial rests on the archival. They are not separate or objective categories. Their relationship may be figured as a horizontal slider running from archive on the left to edition on the right.

Every position on the slider involves interpretative judgement, but the archival impulse is more document-facing and the editorial is, relatively speaking, more audience-facing. Each depends upon or anticipates the need for its co-dependent Other. The archival impulse aims to satisfy the shared need for a reliable record of the documentary evidence; the editorial impulse to further interpret it for known or envisaged audiences by taking their anticipated needs into account.

The sliding scroll-bar model dispenses with recent anxiety about archives replacing editions.