The Icon and the Text: American Book History and the Construction of the World's Largest-Grossing Illustrated Book, Madonna's Sex (1992)

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 184-211
Author(s):  
MANAV RATTI
Keyword(s):  
National Culture ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Book History ◽  
Freedom Of Speech ◽  
Production Distribution ◽  
Book Selling ◽  
American Book ◽  
Illustrated Book

Madonna's book Sex (1992) is the world's largest-grossing illustrated book, selling 1.4 million copies worldwide and earning US$70 million in sales at retail. This essay is the first to use methods from the discipline of bibliography to analyze the book's production, distribution, and reception. This article extends scholarship on Madonna, including about her iconicity and visuality, from her songs and videos to her print culture. I demonstrate how Sex – both as a printed book and as an expression of national culture – is part of a dynamic American book history that constructs notions of America, including freedom of speech, thought, and religion.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Michelle Levy
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Book History ◽  
Manuscript Culture ◽  
Writing Practices ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Manuscript Production ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
Media Interaction ◽  
Political Conditions

The Introduction draws upon recent work in the fields of book history, literary and media studies, textual scholarship and digital humanities, to advance the fundamental thesis of early modern scholars – that manuscript production and circulation continued long after the advent of print. It also supports the consensus of media historians – that newer media (such as print) did not overtake and subsume older media forms (such as manuscript). Repudiating a ‘decline and rise’ or ‘succession’ model of technological change, this book instead posits a model characterized by media interaction and exchange. Taking Romantic-era literary manuscript culture and its inevitable entanglement with print as its central subject, the subsequent six chapters examine the literary manuscripts and writing practices of several central Romantic authors, and the shifting set of cultural and political conditions they faced. In doing so, this study presents a new account of literary Romanticism, one that recalibrates accounts of individual authors’ works, careers and practices; reconstructs networks of authors, editors, publishers and readers; and reconfigures concepts of privacy, sociability and publicity. It also addresses how the expanding print culture of the late eighteenth century impacted both the practices and the values ascribed to manuscript culture.

1. American culture in red, white, and black

2018 ◽  
pp. 8-23
Author(s):  
Eric Avila
Keyword(s):  
National Culture ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Colonial America ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Free Expression ◽  
The South ◽  
Indian Land

“American culture in red, white, and black” explains how diverse Americans planted the seeds of a new national culture during the colonial period, one that took shape through the contributions of people from Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Even as rival colonial powers usurped Indian land, and as Anglo-Americans expanded the institution of slavery in the South, a homegrown American culture took shape that reflected a synthesis of European, African, and indigenous influences. Women also made distinct contributions to this new culture, even as they found limits to their independence and free expression. The growing print culture in colonial America, which saw the publication of newspapers, provided a vital network of communication.

The Polish and Wider Central European Enlightenment – was there a Radical Tendency?

2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 309-320
Author(s):  
Jonathan Israel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Book History ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Central European ◽  
European Context ◽  
Radical Enlightenment

Whereas during the first half of the eighteenth century the expression ‘oświecony’ in Polish was nearly always a religious metaphor, between the 1760s and the early nineteenth century the noun ‘oświeconie’ became secularized, broadened and given a quite revolutionary new meaning, denoting an intellectually grounded, rational and true understanding of things in contrast to how traditional religious authority understood things. This is well known to scholars and students alike. But the question now arises, with the rise over the last 20 to 30 years of ‘Radical Enlightenment’ as a fundamental new category in the humanities, how much has this category applicability in the Central European context? Studying book history and print culture, I shall argue, helps us to determine that in fact it does.

scholarly journals Self-Reflexive Materialities in Contemporary American Fiction

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 292-295
Author(s):  
Lizzy Pournara
Keyword(s):  
Print Culture ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
University Of Iowa ◽  
Contemporary American Fiction ◽  
American Book

Review of Alexander Starre, Metamedia: American Book Fictions and Literary Print Culture after Digitization. Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2015, 316 pp. ISBN 978-1-60938-359-6.

PRINT, NEWSPAPERS AND AUDIENCES IN COLONIAL KENYA: AFRICAN AND INDIAN IMPROVEMENT, PROTEST AND CONNECTIONS

Africa ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 81 (1) ◽  
pp. 155-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bodil Folke Frederiksen
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Freedom Of Speech ◽  
Language Choice ◽  
Passive Resistance ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
Political Associations ◽  
The Right ◽  
Resistance Movement

ABSTRACTThe article addresses African and Indian newspaper networks in Kenya in the late 1940s in an Indian Ocean perspective. Newspapers were important parts of a printing culture that was sustained by Indian and African nationalist politics and economic enterprise. In this period new intermediary groups of African and Indian entrepreneurs, activists and publicists, collaborating around newspaper production, captured fairly large and significant non-European audiences (some papers had print runs of around ten thousand) and engaged them in new ways, incorporating their aspirations, writings and points of view in newspapers. They depended on voluntary and political associations and anti-colonial struggles in Kenya and on links to nationalists in India and the passive resistance movement in South Africa. They sidestepped the European-dominated print culture and created an anti-colonial counter-voice. Editors insisted on the right to write freely and be heard, and traditions of freedom of speech put a brake on censorship. Furthermore, the shifting networks of financial, editorial and journalistic collaboration, and the newspapers’ language choice – African vernaculars, Gujarati, Swahili and English – made intervention difficult for the authorities. With time, the politics and ideologies sustaining the newspapers pulled in different directions, with African nationalism gaining the upper hand among the forces that shaped the future independent Kenyan nation.

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