The Unfinished Book: Introduction

The introduction outlines the case made by the contributors to The Unfinished Book for the continuing vitality of the material book as object of humanistic inquiry. It argues, first, that book studies and literary studies remain mutually relevant in the in the twenty-first century; and second, that the book’s unfinishedness is constitutive—of its manifold meanings as well as its doings in the world. The introduction goes on to explains the volume’s division into three sections. Chapters in the first section respond to the question “what is a book?” as they assemble a long history of bibliodiversity. In the second section, dedicated to the question “where are books?,” chapters explore books’ locations and boundary-crossing migrations. Finally, the introduction describes section of the volume that asks “when are books?” In this section, chapters highlight books’ existence in time, their amenability to recycling and reordering, and their resistance to linear accounts of development and change.