Based on an exhibition at the Pierpont Morgan Library, this handsome book demonstrates taht far from being a 'minor art,' book illustration was a genre of great imagination and equally great beauty.

The most comprehensive book of its kind, this gorgeous edition presents more than 500 full-color works by famous and lesser-known artists from the heyday of book and magazine illustration. Featured artists include Walter Crane, Edmund Dulac, Maxfield Parrish, Howard Pyle, Arthur Rackham, N. C. Wyeth, and many others — 101 in all. Several examples of each artist's finest illustrations are accompanied by biographical comments and career notes. Additional artists include Victorian-era illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, noted for his compelling combinations of the erotic and grotesque; American painter Harvey Dunn, one of Howard Pyle's most accomplished students; James Montgomery Flagg, famed for his U.S. Army recruitment posters; Charles Dana Gibson, creator of the iconic Gibson Girl; Charles R. Knight, a pioneer in the depiction of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures; Edward Penfield, the king of poster art; Frederic Remington, whose works document the Old West; J. Allen St. John, the principal illustrator of Edgar Rice Burroughs's adventure tales; and dozens of others.

"...skillfully compiled...should be useful to anyone interested in placing his or her studies in the context of printed and bound literature..." --ENGLISH LITERATURE IN TRANSITION 1880-1920

Hitherto relegated to the closets of art history and literary studies, book illustration has entered mainstream scholarship. The chapters of this collection offer only a glimpse of where a complete reconfiguration of the visual periphery of eighteenth-century texts might ultimately take us. The use of the gerund of the verb “to reconfigure” in the subtitle of this collection, instead of the corresponding noun, underlines the work-in-progress character of this interdisciplinary endeavour, which aims above all to discern new vistas while charting or revisiting landmarks in the rich field of eighteenth-century book illustration. The specific interpretive lenses through which contributors to this collection re-evaluate the visual periphery of the text cover an array of disciplines and areas of interest; among these, the most prominent are book history and print culture, art history and image theory, material and visual culture, word and image interaction, feminist theory and gender studies, history of medicine and technology. This spectrum could have been even less restrictive and more colourful if it were not for pragmatic and editorial considerations. Nonetheless, its plurality of vision provides a framework for an inclusive and multifaceted approach to eighteenth-century book illustration. Perhaps these essays are most valuable in the practical models they provide on how to tackle the interdisciplinary challenge that is the study of the eighteenth-century illustrated book. The collection as such is the first formal step in an effort to rethink or reconfigure the visual periphery of eighteenth-century texts. It has become clear that the study of the illustrated book of the Age of Enlightenment has the potential of yielding multiple findings, perspectives and discourses about a society immersed in visual culture, skilled in visual communication and reflected in the visual legacy it left behind.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, publishing houses in London, New York, Paris, Stuttgart, and Berlin produced books in ever greater numbers. But it was not just the advent of mass printing that created the era’s “bookish” culture. According to Andrew Piper, romantic writing and romantic writers played a crucial role in adjusting readers to this increasingly international and overflowing literary environment. Learning how to use and to want books occurred through more than the technological, commercial, or legal conditions that made the growing proliferation of books possible; the making of such bibliographic fantasies was importantly a product of the symbolic operations contained within books as well. Examining novels, critical editions, gift books, translations, and illustrated books, as well as the communities who made them, Dreaming in Books tells a wide-ranging story of the book’s identity at the turn of the nineteenth century. In so doing, it shows how many of the most pressing modern communicative concerns are not unique to the digital age but emerged with a particular sense of urgency during the bookish upheavals of the romantic era. In revisiting the book’s rise through the prism of romantic literature, Piper aims to revise our assumptions about romanticism, the medium of the printed book, and, ultimately, the future of the book in our so-called digital age.

A concise edition of the highly acclaimed Oxford Companion to the Book, this book features the 51 articles from the Companion plus 3 brand new chapters in one affordable volume. The 54 chapters introduce readers to the fascinating world of book history. Including 21 thematic studies on topics such as writing systems, the ancient and the medieval book, and the economics of print, as well as 33 regional and national histories of 'the book', offering a truly global survey of the book around the world, the Oxford History of the Book is the most comprehensive work of its kind. The three new articles, specially commissioned for this spin-off, cover censorship, copyright and intellectual property, and book history in the Caribbean and Bermuda. All essays are illustrated throughout with reproductions, diagrams, and examples of various typographical features. Beautifully produced and hugely informative, this is a must-have for anyone with an interest in book history and the written word.

In this ambitious and exciting work Richard Maxwell uses nineteenth-century urban fiction--particularly the novels of Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens--to define a genre, the novel of urban mysteries. His title comes from the "mystery mania" that captured both sides of the channel with the runaway success of Eugene Sue's Les mysteres de Paris and G. W. M. Reynold's Mysteries of London. Richard Maxwell argues that within these extravagant but fact-obsessed narratives, the archaic form of allegory became a means for understanding modern cities. The city dwellers' drive to interpret linked the great metropolises with the discourses of literature and art (the primary vehicles of allegory). Dominant among allegorical figures were labyrinths, panoramas, crowds, and paperwork, and it was thought that to understand a figure was to understand the city with which it was linked. Novelists such as Hugo and Dickens had a special flair for using such figures to clarify the nature of the city. Maxwell draws from an array of disciplines, ideas, and contexts. His approach to the nature and evolution of the mysteries genre includes examinations of allegorical theory, journalistic practice, the conventions of scientific inquiry, popular psychiatry, illustration, and modernized wonder tales (such as Victorian adaptations of the Arabian Nights). In The Mysteries of Paris and London Maxwell employs a sweeping vision of the nineteenth century and a formidable grasp of both popular culture and high culture to decode the popular mysteries of the era and to reveal man's evolving consciousness of the city. His style is elegant and lucid. It is a book for anyone curious about the fortunes of the novel in thenineteenth century, the cultural history of that period, particularly in France and England, the relations between art and literature, or the power of the written word to produce and present social knowledge.

From the time that George Bernard Shaw remarked that “Rebecca West could handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could and much more savagely,” West’s writings and her politics have elicited strong reactions. This collection of her letters—the first ever published—has been culled from the estimated ten thousand she wrote during her long life. The more than two hundred selected letters follow this spirited author, critic, and journalist from her first feminist campaign for women’s suffrage when she was a teenager through her reassessments of the twentieth century written in 1982, in her ninetieth year. The letters, which are presented in full, include correspondence with West’s famous lover H. G. Wells and with Shaw, Virginia Woolf, Emma Goldman, Noel Coward, and many others; offer pronouncements on such contemporary authors as Norman Mailer, Nadine Gordimer, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.; and provide new insights into her battles against misogyny, fascism, and communism. West deliberately fashions her own biography through this intensely personal correspondence, challenging rival accounts of her groundbreaking professional career, her frustrating love life, and her tormented family relations. Engrossing to read, the collection sheds new light on this important figure and her social and literary milieu.

Focusing on questions of space and locale in children’s literature, this collection explores how metaphorical and physical space can create landscapes of power, knowledge, and identity in texts from the early nineteenth century to the present. The collection is comprised of four sections that take up the space between children and adults, the representation of 'real world' places, fantasy travel and locales, and the physical space of the children’s book-as-object. In their essays, the contributors analyze works from a range of sources and traditions by authors such as Sylvia Plath, Maria Edgeworth, Gloria Anzaldúa, Jenny Robson, C.S. Lewis, Elizabeth Knox, and Claude Ponti. While maintaining a focus on how location and spatiality aid in defining the child’s relationship to the world, the essays also address themes of borders, displacement, diaspora, exile, fantasy, gender, history, home-leaving and homecoming, hybridity, mapping, and metatextuality. With an epilogue by Philip Pullman in which he discusses his own relationship to image and locale, this collection is also a valuable resource for understanding the work of this celebrated author of children’s literature.