Double Life of Books

Peter D. McDonald is Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Hugh’s College. He writes on literature, the modern state and free expression; the history of writing systems, cultural institutions and publishing; multilingualism, translation and interculturality; and on the promise of creative criticism. His principal publications include British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880–1914 (1997); Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays by D F McKenzie, co-edited with Michael Suarez (2002); The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences (2009; see also theliteraturepolice.com), which was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Writing 2011; and Artefacts of Writing: Ideas of the State and Communities of Letters from Matthew Arnold to Xu Bing (2017; see also artefactsofwriting.com). He is also co-author of PEN International: An Illustrated History (2021), which was Motovun Book of the Year for 2021.

McDonald takes us on one engrossing and eye-opening trip after another into the multi-layered domain of the written word – writing as profession, as practice, as industry, as trade.

• Preface: Two Voices AcknowledgementsFiguresFirst Voice1. ‘The History of Sex’: orality, literacy, and the living brain2. ‘The Lure of Literature’: books, histories, and the state3. ‘Scant Cream’: sense, nonsense, and the reader re-made4. My Finnegans Wake: Like HCE, Rhodes Must FallSecond VoicePart I: Extra-disciplinary: Questions of Method1. Getting over discipline envy2. Ideas of the book and experiences of literature: after Theory?3. Reclaiming the Future of Book History from an African Perspective4. Elton John, libel, and the perils of close reading5. The Worldliness of BooksPart II: Reading Envelopes: Four examples6. Re-publishing Yeats’s ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ in the 1890s7. Re-reading Pound’s ‘In a station of the metro’8. Calder’s Beckett9. Once upon a time in a bookshop: The Satanic Verses revisitedBibliographyIndex