{"product_id":"the-unfinished-book","title":"The Unfinished Book","description":"This collection is founded on the premise that the physical book is far from exhausted as informational medium, art object, or conceptual resource. The contributors to \u003cem\u003e The Unfinished Book\u003c\/em\u003e identify the many ways in which study of books -- of their compounding of matter and meaning, of their global travels and historical transitions, of their shaping of and by new media technologies -- remains unfinished business for humanist scholarship generally, and literary studies in particular. The collection's 32 chapters demonstrate in tandem how much book history has to gain in turn from engaging the most vital and innovative literary-critical modes of the 21st-century. Book studies thus intersects here with scholarship on empire, the environment, disability, and affect, as well as with work in African-American and Indigenous studies. Literary study is uniquely positioned, this collection asserts, to honour books' distinctive ways of both meaning things and being things. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThe chapters span a terrain that extends from the earliest surviving writings of the Indus Valley to Cicero's 1st-century B.C.E. library to the latest videogames. Some model new ways of thinking about the form, edges, and boundaries of the book as they demonstrate how seldom the book's history as a material object is terminated at the moment of its manufacture. Other chapters highlight the provisionality that makes the book's conceptual boundaries fuzzy, unfinished, and variable; many seek to overturn triumphalist histories that recount the story of the book as though it were Western and white. Overall, this collection launches a new generation of scholarship as it introduces provocative new approaches about the nature, place, and time of books.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAlexandra Gillespie, \u003cem\u003eProfessor of English and Medieval Studies, University of Toronto\u003c\/em\u003e, Deidre Lynch, \u003cem\u003eErnest Bernbaum Professor of English Literature, Harvard University\u003c\/em\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eAlexandra Gillespie is Professor of English at the University of Toronto and a member of Toronto's Collaborative Program in Book History and Print Culture and its Centre for Medieval Studies. At Toronto Gillespie also directs the Mellon Foundation-supported Old Books New Science Laboratory. Her publications include \u003cem\u003e Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and their Books\u003c\/em\u003e (Oxford, 2006) and, as co-editor, \u003cem\u003e The Production of Books in England, 1350-1500\u003c\/em\u003e (Cambridge, 2011). A new monograph, \u003cem\u003e Chaucer's Books\u003c\/em\u003e, is forthcoming in 2021. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eDeidre Lynch is Ernest Bernbaum Professor of English Literature at Harvard. Her numerous publications on eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century literature, culture, and reading communities include \u003cem\u003e Loving Literature: A Cultural History\u003c\/em\u003e (Chicago, 2015), \u003cem\u003e The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning\u003c\/em\u003e (Chicago, 1998), as editor, \u003cem\u003e Janeites: Austen's Disciples and Devotees\u003c\/em\u003e (Princeton, 2000) and, as co-editor, \u003cem\u003e Cultural Institutions of the Novel\u003c\/em\u003e (Duke, 1996). She is currently completing \u003cem\u003e Paper Slips: Disassembling and Remaking the Book\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Oxford University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50440398733586,"sku":"9780198830801","price":161.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_f2ab966e-18d5-4947-8481-a2b6609098e1.jpg?v=1729660296","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/the-unfinished-book","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}