The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture: Volume One: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660
Joad Raymond
Abstract
What did most people read? Where did they get it? Where did it come from? What were its uses in its readers' lives? How was it produced and distributed? What were its relations to the wider world of print culture? How did it develop over time? These questions are central to this series of books devoted to the exploration of popular print culture in English from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the present. Between the beginning of the sixteenth century and the later seventeenth, governments, institutions, and individuals learned to use inexpensively-produced printed texts to inform, e ... More
What did most people read? Where did they get it? Where did it come from? What were its uses in its readers' lives? How was it produced and distributed? What were its relations to the wider world of print culture? How did it develop over time? These questions are central to this series of books devoted to the exploration of popular print culture in English from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the present. Between the beginning of the sixteenth century and the later seventeenth, governments, institutions, and individuals learned to use inexpensively-produced printed texts to inform, entertain, and persuade. Cheap print quickly became rooted in British and Irish culture, both elite and popular. This book examines the developing role of popular printed texts in the first two centuries of print in Britain and Ireland. Its forty-five chapters (with sixty-six illustrations) look at a broad range of historical and social contexts, at comparisons with other European countries, at the variety of content and themes in cheap printed texts, the forms and genres that developed with and were used by cheap print, and concludes with a series of case studies exploring the role of print in particular years. The book takes none of these terms — popular, print, culture — for granted, but interrogates each of them with a rich, contoured picture of the relationship between a popular readership, the materiality of books, the economy of the book trade, and political and cultural history.
Keywords:
print culture,
sixteenth century,
British culture,
Irish culture,
printed text,
readership,
materiality,
book trade,
political history,
cultural history
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2011 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199287048 |
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199287048.001.0001 |