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
Introduction
- 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
once we acknowledge that the physical book as a whole is a rich complex of signs, each of which has its own human history and all of which unite to create the ‘finished’ book as a palpably articulated ‘text’ (to form it, not de-form it), then we enter an entirely new, more positive and, for me at least, more exciting phase of textual criticism.
By the time you read these opening lines you have already formed an impression of this book and perhaps established certain fundamental truths about it. These will most likely be challenged or confirmed as you read, but the point remains that you have established them using some textual and some non-textual signifiers. You encounter thresholds with each book you come across: the cover, the picture: what is inscribed on the outside of the volume either in text or in image. These signifiers lead you to conclusions about genre, audience, relevance and scope, and those conclusions are altered, or confirmed or dismissed, upon delving further into the object. In other words, you have first encountered the material form of the book: you have first read that materiality, and you read that materiality every time you come into contact with a physical text. This text has a physical reality. The physical, material nature of the text can change (you may be reading this, for instance, on a computer screen), but the materiality of the text always contributes to its meaning.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Readings on Audience and Textual Materiality , pp. 1 - 8Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014