The book’s challenge is to carve out a literary-critical approach that brings all sides of Lawrence’s verbal art forms together as a recognisable whole, but not by the traditional means of defining an underlying philosophy. Instead a bio-bibliographically informed approach traces Lawrence’s developing imaginary, his unfolding intellectual project, along highways and byways alike until his broader oeuvre-in-process becomes the object of study. The book analyses work-versions, where significant developments are materially witnessed, rather than confining attention to the works’ published forms. Zooming in to focus on changed patterns and wordings on this manuscript or that typescript is followed by a pulling back to survey the wider patterning and stylistic shift. Cross-currents from his reading, marriage and friendships circulated through his contemporaneous writings in all its forms. This shifting repertoire of image and idea was increasingly organised by a structural habit of projecting polarised fundamentals into staged encounters with his subject matter. A text-gambler, Lawrence would trust this performative approach to dictate the movement of idea and attitude.

This chapter argues that the decade of the 1810s, especially when understood as ‘the Regency’, reflects a vision of time as static and repetitive, resistant to what Walter Benjamin famously called ‘homogenous, empty time’. To this end, this chapter looks at an unusual textual archive, nineteenth-century flagellation pornography. Two works are analysed with differing connections to the decade: Venus School-Mistress, probably published in 1810, and The Rodiad, written in 1871 but masquerading as a text of the 1810s. Comparing these two texts – one an authentic product of the period, the other an erotic antiquarian hoax – reveals not just the consistent temporal multiplicity of nineteenth-century pornography. It also demonstrates how the 1810s take on a paradoxical historiographical role as a specific example of the repetitive sameness of time. In so doing, the chapter aims to recast the idea of ‘the 1810s’ as a node of reactionary resistance to the temporality of liberal progress.

This chapter uses the first Italian bibliography – Anton Francesco Doni’s La libraria (1550) – to reflect on the process of compiling literary history, and analyse approaches and attitudes to poets and poetry in the Cinquecento. It considers the degree to which current critical interest in the concept of social communities in poetry, especially in relation to Petrarchism, correspond to Cinquecento concerns. Petrarchism is ubiquitous in Doni’s work, and especially visible in praise for Tuscan and eminent models like Pietro Bembo, Iacopo Sannazaro and Vittoria Colonna, but it co-exists alongside poets who overtly reject the Tuscan model and/or satirise the obsessive fascination with a narrow set of rules for writing lyrics. Listing authors by name rather than genre emphasises the extent to which most Cinquecento writers composed in a variety of modes and reveals a more expansive conceptualisation of authorship not yet constrained by Romantic notions of individual genius.

A survey of the surviving manuscripts containing works by Matthew Paris and their ownership in the later Middle Ages and post-Reformation period.

The introduction sets out the history of the establishment of the British Museum and the subsequent creation of the British Library as a separate institution. It goes on to explore book collections in the early modern period, referring to writings by Edmund Spenser, Thomas Browne, and Francis Bacon. It argues that the library has never been defined as a place where books are wholly set apart and that they should instead be seen as part of wider collections. It looks at the place of books within cabinets of curiosity, arguing that books both belong in and yet are still somehow different from wider collections. Finally, it argues that the distinction of a book from an object can be unwieldy and dependent on the reader. It ends by proposing that Hans Sloane’s collection is the ideal place to think through what an institutional library is, and what it means to use books.

This chapter articulates the book’s main intervention and contribution, ending with a brief discussion of the phrases “is a book” and “like a book.” Premodern writers who said something “is” or is “like a book” forged the very conceptual connection that How the World Became a Book traces through English culture. Contains six major sections covering the contribution and intervention of the book.

Taking the nationalisation of the telegraph in 1870 as a starting point, this chapter considers how information was understood as immaterial yet depended upon a complex material infrastructure. The first section addresses telegraphy as a technology of the present, enabling people to experience new kinds of contemporaneity, while, at the same time, ensuring that it remained stubbornly uneven. The second turns to text, exploring how it was made suitable for transmission by new information technologies and the new kinds of workers employed to process it. The third looks at the print archive. To ensure the right information could be readily retrieved, systems of bibliographic control were developed to manage the material from which it derived. Throughout, I return to Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875). Trollope’s novel is deeply interested in the contemporary, attending to the technologies that structure the moment and those that make that moment pass.

With an understanding of ‘bibliography’ in its original sense of writing about books, this chapter provides a genealogy of the British bibliographical essay, commencing with the medieval bibliophile Richard de Bury. It traces the development of that species of essay through the eighteenth century, when essays started widely appearing in broadsides, newspapers, and magazines as well as books, motivating essayists to reflect upon the material form in which they were publishing. Following the periodical essayists’ critique of commercial print culture, Romantic essayists like Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Thomas De Quincey turned their attention to old books, emphasising their tangible, material value, while at the same time upholding literature’s immaterial qualities. In the age of bibliomania, antiquarian books became an opportunity for the bibliographical essay to come into its own among an expanding audience of bibliophiles and collectors.

This volume’s introduction traces the longstanding interdigitation between American literature and sexuality studies broadly imagined, mapping the inseparability between queer American literature and the history of sexuality. In so doing, it offers an institutional history of gay and lesbian studies, queer studies, and trans studies and grapples with the theoretical question of how to understand queer American literature. Examining the mutual imbrication of “queer,” “American,” and “literature,” it provides an overview of the volume’s theoretical investments, conceptual choices, and organization in order to introduce the reader to the volume as a whole.

This chapter presents a brief overview of the status of and threats to the Little Owl. We then offer a conservation strategy for the owl that involves five critical success factors: Knowledge, Limiting Factors, Evolution of Landscape Conditions, Legislation and Policies, and People. Thereafter, we describe four main drivers to implement this strategy, focused on Monitoring, Management, Standardized Methodologies and Data Management. The long-term conservation of the Little Owl is complicated, as the species is largely linked to an agriculturally dominated landscape. This landscape condition can change rapidly and significantly due to human demographics, and changes in policies and management. The conservation strategy described in this chapter requires a multiscale, multidisciplinary approach, with collaboration between different stakeholders (conservationists, scientists, different authorities, farmers) and additional research into the ecology of the species. This strategy must be applied at different levels: local, regional, national and international. We encourage people involved in this conservation strategy to work broadly, openly and to freely co-ordinate on issues, data, and management efforts that will benefit the broader array of species and environments of which the Little Owl is a part.

Chapter 11 demonstrates that De l’Allemagne’s surviving 1810 texts are not identical, as had been thought. We have texts from all three proof runs. In Vienna sits a copy of the 1810 edition; the censors’ proof and the copy‑text for 1813 subsist. This makes a mockery of Napoleon’s efforts to obliterate the book, allowing a peek at the “lost” 1810 edition and tracing a remarkable interplay between four conflicting pulls on the author. Her desires to clarify imprecise or obscure passages, and to use key words from elsewhere in De l’Allemagne, confront her desires to be faithful to her sources and to the facts. Exerting its own pull on this interplay is the fierce pressure on Staël to tone down her polemic. These forced revisions fall in with her book’s slide from politics into literary history, which for two centuries now has dimmed the ringing attack on tyranny that caused its pulping.

Chapter 2 traces the balancing or buffeting of our author between private and public spheres, beneath the burning sky of the Revolution. It follows the appearance of her first published work, the Lettres sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in granular detail, amid the highly charged context of 1788–1789, as the French Revolution began; it then traces the publication in context of her story Zulma and her Recueil de morceaux détachés, in 1794–1795, arguing for a radical redating of several pieces in this collection.

An introduction to the book’s thesis of the role played in Virgil’s Aeneid by engagement with the Stoic, specifically Chrysippean, concept of human responsibility or freedom as a means to allow the poem’s gods and heroes to assent meaningfully to providential World Fate. This, it is suggested, becomes a model for Virgil’s guardedly optimistic conception of the Augustan Empire. A bibliography follows of the key pertinent modern literature on the field including works by R. Heinze, M. Bowra, M. Edwards, R. Rabel, M. Schauer, D. Quint, H.-P. Stahl, C. Nash, and J. Farrell. It is concluded that the literature so far has not adequately appreciated the full significance of Virgil’s adoption of Chrysippus’ belief in human responsibility and in World Fate and providence.

Explores the relationship between theatre history and dramatic criticism, exploring how the two were shaped by historiography’s embrace of English theatre and drama during the mid-seventeenth century. Responds to Richard Schoch’s argument that theatre history emerged as a field of study only with the “the weakening of the humanist paradigm that restricted history to public affairs.” Argues that historiography did not only lower its standards to include theatre; rather, the cultural and political upheaval of the 1640s and 1650s elevated theatre to the level of public affairs. Moreover, once the formerly reliable institutions of theatre and drama were threatened with oblivion, commentators were motivated to create and preserve records of the fleeting dramatic past. Describes how dramatic paratexts not only changed and became more prevalent after the closure of the theatres in 1642, but also became a medium for dramatic criticism, with prefaces assuming the role previously played by live conversation and verbal exchanges in the theatres. Attests to the lasting impact the closure of the theatres in 1642 had, and continues to have, on the reception and construction of English theatre history.