Caxton's trace : studies in the history of English printing
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Caxton's trace : studies in the history of English printing
University of Notre Dame Press, c2006
- : pbk
Available at 13 libraries
Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Contents of Works
- A theory of the early English printing firm : jobbing, book publishing, and the problem of productive capacity in Caxton's work / David R. Carlson
- Violent hierarchies : disciplining women and merchant capitalists in The book of the knyght of the towre / Mark Addison Amos
- Caxton's continent / Jennifer R. Goodman
- Taking advice from a Frenchwoman : Caxton, Pynson, and Christine de Pizan's moral proverbs / A.E.B. Coldiron
- "Folowynge the trace of Mayster Caxton" : some histories of fifteenth-century printed books / Alexandra Gillespie
- "Onely imagined" : vernacular community and the English press / William Kuskin
- Old news : Caxton, de Worde, and the invention of the edition / William N. West
- Losing French : vernacularity, nation, and Caxton's English statutes / Patricia Clare Ingham
- Early modern Middle English / Tim William Machan
- Caxton in the nineteenth century / Seth Lerer
Description and Table of Contents
Description
William Caxton (ca. 1421-1492) and the printers who immediately followed him, Wynkyn de Worde and Richard Pynson, dominated early English printing. Surprisingly, their ideological impact on English literary history-their transformation of a textual economy based in manuscript production, their strategic development of authorship, their collation of English literature-remains largely unrecognized, overshadowed by the work of later sixteenth-century printers and folded into the general transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. This collection, the first such work on Caxton and his contemporaries, consists of ten original essays that explore early English culture, from Caxton's introduction of the press, through questions of audience, translation, politics, and genre, to the modern fascination with Caxton's books. The contributors to this volume approach the study of the printed book as the study of literary culture, and so broaden the traditional terms of bibliography to argue that no full understanding of books is possible without consideration of the larger nature of cultural production and reproduction. On one level, then, the book reads early printers' editions as evolutionary, reproducing preexisting production methods; on another, however, it argues that these printers introduced a significantly new relationship between material and symbolic forms. Thus, Caxton's Trace suggests that the first century of print production is defined less by transition or break, than by a dynamic transformation in literary production itself.
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