Global Histories of Books

Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English, in the English Faculty at the University of Oxford, UK, and Director of TORCH. Her most recent monograph, Indian Arrivals 1870-1915, won the ESSE 2016 prize for Literature in English. Her novels include Nile Baby (2008), and The Shouting in the Dark (2015, long-listed Barry Ronge-Sunday Times prize).Rouven Kunstmann is a doctoral researcher in History at the University of Oxford, UK. He focuses on print cultures, nationalism, decolonisation and photography in West Africa as global and local information circulation. His work has been recently published in Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies.Priyasha Mukhopadhyay is a Junior Fellow at the Society of Fellows, Harvard University, USA. Her research interests include the history of the colonial and postcolonial book, South Asian literatures, and theories of the archive. Asha Rogers is Lecturer in Contemporary Postcolonial Literature at the School of English, Drama and American & Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her research interests include postcolonial literatures, the Cold War and decolonisation, and the interfaces between state cultural institutions and literature.

“This rich and diverse collection of essays certainly proves a valuable addition to the growing scholarship on the global histories and transnational circulation of books. It also provides professors with fascinating case studies to examine with their students.” (Cécile Cottenet, Comparativ -Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung, Vol. 29 (3), 2019)

• Chapter 1. Introduction.- SECTION ONE: COLONIAL NETWORKS.- Chapter 2. London’s Geographic Knowledge Network and the Anson Account (1748) - Katherine Parker.-  Chapter 3. The Other Empire: Australian Books and American Publishers in the late nineteenth century- David Carter.- Chapter 4. Reading by Chance in a World of Wandering Texts - Alexander Bubb.- SECTION TWO: GLOBAL GENRES.- Chapter 5. ‘Read! Learn!’: Globalisation and (G)localisation in Caribbean Textbook Publishing - Gail Low.- Chapter 6. Governing by the Book: Mediterranean Travel and Sanitary Prophylaxis in the Nineteenth-Century - Riccardo Liberatore.- Chapter 7. The Circle of Knowledge: Radical Commensurability and the Deaf Textbook - Hansun Hsiung.- SECTION THREE: READING RELATIONSHIPS.- Chapter 8. ‘Bringing Spring to Sahbai’s Rose-Garden’: Persian Printing in North India after 1857 - Zahra Shah.- Chapter 9. Reading The Discoveryof India in the Library of an Australian Prime Minister - Sybil Nolan.- SECTION FOUR: CULTURAL TRANSLATION.- Chapter 10. Bustānī’s Iliad and Imperialism in the Middle East - Evelyn Richardson.- Chapter 11. ‘The Narcissism of Small Differences’: Plagiarism in South African Letters - Kate Highman.- Chapter 12. The Fear of Solitude: How Marketing Makes Real Magic - Ben Holgate.- Afterword - Elleke Boehmer.-