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.
Ahmed El Shamsy: Rediscovery of the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. 312 pp. ISBN 978 0 69117456 3.
