Libraries and literature in Rome

A chapter of 6,000 words on books, literary culture, and public and private libraries in the ancient city of Rome

Charles Prentice and T.F. Powys: a publisher’s influence

This article draws substantially on archival evidence to present a full account of the publishing history of the major works of T.F. Powys. It reveals the crucial role played by Charles Prentice, senior partner at the firm of Chatto & Windus, and places the discussion within the context of inter-war publishing and literary culture.

Writers' rooms: theories of contemporary authorship in portraits of creative spaces

This article analyzes two series of photographs and essays on writers’ rooms published in England and Canada in 2007 and 2008. The Guardian’s Writers Rooms series, with photographs by Eamon McCabe, ran in 2007. In the summer of 2008, The Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival began to post its own version of The Guardian column on its website by displaying, each week leading up to the Festival in September, a different writer’s “writing space” and an accompanying paragraph. I argue that these images of writers’ rooms, which suggest a cultural fascination with authors’ private compositional practices and materials, reveal a great deal about theoretical constructions of authorship implicit in contemporary literary culture. Far from possessing the museum quality of dead authors’ spaces, rooms that are still being used, incorporating new forms of writing technology, and having drafts of manuscripts scattered around them, can offer insight into such well-worn and ineffable areas of speculation as inspiration, singular authorial genius, and literary productivity.

Greek printing outside Greece, from the 15th century to e-books

An exhibition of rare Greek printed books, with printed items dating from 1488 to recent decades, and rarely seen in one setting. This exhibition focuses on the typographic continuity of Greek literary culture.

Mediating culture in the Italian literary field, 1940s-1950s: an introduction

This introduction lays out the scholarly and methodological context where to situate the contributions to this special issue. By combining a rigorous scrutiny of hitherto untapped archival sources with a re-examined application of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of culture within the field of periodical studies and publishing history in Italy (1940s-1950s), the studies illuminate the complex ways in which journals, periodical editors, and the connected publishing houses negotiate cultural practice in a literary field increasingly dominated by the polarization of political discourse.