Volume II of Lyotard's Miscellaneous Texts, "Contemporary Artists," gathers thirty-nine essays by Lyotard that deal with twenty-seven influential and innovative contemporary artists.

This book examines one of the most pervasive, but also perplexing, textual phenomena of the early modern world: the manuscript miscellany. Faced with multiple problems of definition, categorization, and (often conflicting) terminology, modern scholars have tended to dismiss the miscellany as disorganized and chaotic. Miscellaneous Order radically challenges that view by uncovering the various forms of organization and order previously hidden in early modern manuscript books. Drawing on original literary and historical research, and examining both the materiality of early modern manuscripts and their contents, this book sheds new light on the transcriptive and archival practices of early modern Britain, as well as on the broader intellectual context of manuscript culture and its scholarly afterlives. Based on extensive archival research, and interdisciplinary in both subject and matter, Miscellaneous Order focuses on the myriad kinds of manuscript compiled and produced in the early modern era. Showing that the miscellany was essential to the organization of knowledge across a range of genres and disciplines, from poetry to science, and from recipe books to accounts, it proposes a new model for understanding the proliferation of manuscript material in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By restoring attention to 'miscellaneous order' in this way, it shows that we have fundamentally misunderstood how early modern men and women read, wrote, and thought. Rather than a textual form characterized by an absence of order, the miscellany, it argues, operated as an epistemically and aesthetically productive system throughout the early modern period.

I -Texts from the Umma Region -- I.1 -- Administrative -- Early dynastic iiia -- Early dynastic iiib -- Early Sargonic -- Early to middle Sargonic -- Classical Sargonic -- I.2 -- legal -- I.3 -- Mathematical -- I.4 -- School/exercise -- Texts from Adab -- Ii. 1 -- Administrative -- Early dynastic iiia/b -- Early dynastic to early Sargonic -- Early Sargonic -- Early to middle Sargonic -- Middle Sargonic -- Middle to classical Sargonic -- Classical Sargonic -- Late Sargonic -- Ii. 2 -- bulla -- Ii. 3 -- legal -- Ii. 4 -- letter -- Texts of uncertain provenance -- Iii. 1 -- Administrative texts -- Early dynastic -- Early Sargonic -- Middle to classical Sargonic -- Classical Sargonic -- Late Sargonic -- Iii. 2 -- mathematical -- Iii. 3 -- royal/monumental -- Iii. 4 -- school/exercise.

This book analyses speech-related genres in Early Modern English, providing ideas of what spoken interaction in earlier times might have been like.

Traditional critical editing, defined by the paper and print limitations of the book, is now considered by many to be inadequate for the expression and interpretation of complex works of literature. At the same time, digital developments are permitting us to extend the range of text objects we can reproduce and investigate critically - not just books, but newspapers, draft manuscripts and inscriptions on stone. Some exponents of the benefits of new information technologies argue that in future all editions should be produced in digital or online form. By contrast, others point to the fact that print, after more than five hundred years of development, continues to set the agenda for how we think about text, even in its non-print forms. This important book brings together leading textual critics, scholarly editors, technical specialists and publishers to discuss whether and how existing paradigms for developing and using critical editions are changing to reflect the increased commitment to and assumed significance of digital tools and methodologies.