The History of the Book: Culture, Community, Criticism.

Chetham’s Library and the University of Manchester are pleased to announce their third one-day interdisciplinary history of the book and material culture conference at Chetham's Library, Manchester, taking place Thursday 21st January 2010.

Call for Papers
We invite 20-minute papers from postgraduate students of any discipline who are interested in book history and material culture. Our aim this year is to encourage the combining of methodologies developed in book history in the last thirty years with those of other currents in twentieth-century cultural theory, literary criticism and the study of community. While all abstracts relating to book history and material culture will be considered, we particularly welcome papers that engage any of the following areas:
- The use book history can make of other twentieth-century cultural and literary theory; or the reverse, what might book history perspectives have to say about the writing and dissemination of these intellectual trends?
- The tension between practices of ‘form and content’ reading and book history’s interest in paratextual apparatuses, editorial processes and distribution.
- The relationship between the texts and materials we study and the communities that produce them; how communities inscribe themselves into texts as in the study of second hand books, or communal responses to texts as in ‘fan fiction’.
- The national or cross-cultural transmission of texts, the function of technology in this transmission and the production of international readerships.

Guest Speakers
We are very pleased to announce that Joad Raymond (University of East Anglia) and Isabel Rivers (Queen Mary, University of London) have agreed to present guest papers at our event. Professor Raymond will be discussing Milton and the pan-European circulation of newsbooks in the seventeenth century, and Professor Rivers will present research on the culture of religious publishing in the eighteenth century.
It's free! And so is lunch!
Thanks to the support of the School of Arts, Histories and Cultures SAGE Postgraduate Training Programme, there will be no charge for the conference or for the conference lunch at the Cathedral Refectory. A wine reception will follow the conference.
Abstracts
Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be sent to book-history@manchester.ac.uk by Friday 20th November 2009.
To register to attend please contact the same with details of your position/institution.