Unfinished Book

Compare retailer offers

About this product

This collection is founded on the premise that the physical book is far from exhausted as informational medium, art object, or conceptual resource. The contributors to The Unfinished Book identify the many ways in which study of books -- of their compounding of matter and meaning, of their global travels and historical transitions, of their shaping of and by new media technologies -- remains unfinished business for humanist scholarship generally, and literary studies in particular. The collection's 32 chapters demonstrate in tandem how much book history has to gain in turn from engaging the most vital and innovative literary-critical modes of the 21st-century. Book studies thus intersects here with scholarship on empire, the environment, disability, and affect, as well as with work in African-American and Indigenous studies. Literary study is uniquely positioned, this collection asserts, to honour books' distinctive ways of both meaning things and being things. The chapters span a terrain that extends from the earliest surviving writings of the Indus Valley to Cicero's 1st-century B.C.E. library to the latest videogames. Some model new ways of thinking about the form, edges, and bo

More from Oxford University Press