The indigenous book publishing business for Sundanese-speaking communities started in the early 20th century, when the nationalist movement was set in motion. The modern school system had continued to spread in colonial society from the mid–19th century. The more education spread, the more literate people there were among the indigenous population. The indigenous book publishing business responded to the demands of this newly-emerging readership. Book publishing finally turned into a business by the 1920s. It seems to have provided distinctive readings from those provided by Balai Poestaka. The indigenous publishers played a supplemental role in nurturing print culture in the colonial context. Both government and private indigenous publishers contributed to promote modern readership and a colonial print culture. The book publishing and print culture in regional languages like Sundanese were nurtured in the colonial period and grew to constitute a medium to decolonize knowledge and knowledge culture.
Abstract
Shedding light on the postcolonial Arabic book, this article expands the literary and art historical fields of inquiry by bringing into play the translocal design and visual economy of modern art books. It is focused on the short-lived Silsilat al-Nafa'is (Precious Books series, 1967–70), published in Beirut by Dar an-Nahar and edited by modernist poet Yusuf al-Khal (1917–87). The series engaged prominent Arab artists and foregrounded the aesthetic dimension of the printed Arabic book as a “precious” art object. Situated historically at the threshold of contemporary globalization, this publishing endeavor formed a node connecting transnational modernist art and literary circuits with book publishing and was thus paradigmatic of new forms of visuality of the Arabic book. This materiality was enabled by a network of changes in the visual arts, printing technologies, and the political economy of transnational Arabic publishing in late 1960s Beirut. Relations between these three fields are analyzed through a multifaceted lens, focusing on the book as at once a product of intellectual and artistic practice, a commodity in a capitalist economy of publishing, and a translocal artifact of visual and print culture.
This chapter focuses on the emergence of a remarkable print culture in Dublin. It states that the capital city had become a major center of publishing in the English-speaking world by 1730. The chapter mentions John Smith, one of the leading importers of books directly from Holland and France for near forty years. Smith and his contemporaries had played a critical role in introducing some of the canonical writers of the French Enlightenment to Irish readers, both by sourcing foreign-language imports and by reprinting English translations at rates cheaper than London. The chapter also uncovers how the rise of the print culture resonated in provincial centers but less clearly so in rural Ireland. Critical to the growth of provincial print culture was the spread of newspapers. The chapter then assesses the implications of the great contraction of Dublin book publishing on booksellers, library societies in urban centers, and libraries in provincial centers.
Considers mass readership and the ‘tastes’ it produces. Maps the history of criminals and execution spectacles, particularly as addressed by the London ‘public’ voices of Defoe and Dickens. Connects these mass events to the new mass print culture and circulation forms, such as the penny dreadfuls and their Newgate novel precursor. This shows the development of the public’s ‘taste for blood’, anxieties at an encroaching nonhumanity, and an infatuation with the inhuman from Jack Sheppard to Sweeney Todd and Dracula.
Paratexts have attracted increasing attention in recent scholarship as an especially privileged tool for managing the reception of a text in early print culture, and Thomas More was certainly an exceptionally versatile user of this strategic publishing device. Not only does he make ample use of conventional paratextual techniques such as prefaces, marginal glosses and commendatory poems, he also takes the medium one step further by making his paratexts part of the narrative setting of his works, especially in the literary dialogues. In creating a plethora of (semi-)fictional voices and contexts, he effectively blurs the line between text and context, fact and fiction, and author and editor/printer. While this textual game of hide-and-seek has been extensively studied in Utopia and has often been seen as a typically ‘humanist’ feature of the text, the present article explores similar techniques throughout More’s work, thus overcoming the alleged rift between his pre- and post-reformation writings.
‘Translation’ is one of our all-purpose metaphors for almost any kind of mediation or connection: we ask of a principle how it ‘translates’ into practice, we announce initiatives to ‘translate’ the genome into predictions, and so forth. But the metaphor of translation — of the discovery of equivalents and their mutual substitution — so attracts our attention that we forget the other kinds of inter-linguistic contact, such as transcription, mimicry, borrowing or calque. In a curious echo of the macaronic writings of the era of the dawn of print, the twentieth century's avant-garde, already foreseeing the end of print culture, experimented with hybrid languages. Their untranslatability under the usual definitions of ‘translation’ suggests a revival of this avant-garde practice, as the mainstream aesthetic of the moment invests in ‘convergence’ and the subsumption of all media into digital code.
Colonial Print Culture: Sundanese Book Publishing in the Dutch East Indies in the Early Twentieth Century
