Book History is the official publication of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing. It was established in 1998 and is published annually by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) formed in 1991 in the United States on the initiative of scholars Jonathan Rose, Simon Eliot, and others. Its members study the history of books and the "composition, mediation, reception, survival, and transformation of written communication." The group maintains an electronic discussion list (SHARP-L), produces the academic journal Book History, and holds annual meetings. Membership consists mostly of British and American scholars.
The Johns Hopkins University Press is the publishing division of Johns Hopkins University. It was founded in 1878 and is the oldest continuously running university press in the United States. The Press publishes books, journals, and electronic databases. Considering all its units it is a contender for America's largest university press. Its headquarters are in Charles Village, Baltimore.
Book History is an academic journal devoted to the history of the book, i.e. the history of the creation, dissemination and reception of script and printed materials. It publishes research on the social, economic and cultural history of authorship, editing, printing, the book arts, publishing and the book trade, periodicals, newspapers, ephemera, copyright, censorship, literary agents, libraries, literary criticism, canon formation, literacy, literary education, reading habits, and reader response.
An academic or scholarly journal is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as permanent and transparent forums for the presentation, scrutiny, and discussion of research. They are usually peer-reviewed or refereed. Content typically takes the form of articles presenting original research, review articles, and book reviews. The purpose of an academic journal, according to Henry Oldenburg, is to give researchers a venue to "impart their knowledge to one another, and contribute what they can to the Grand design of improving natural knowledge, and perfecting all Philosophical Arts, and Sciences."
An author is the creator or originator of any written work such as a book or play, and is thus also a writer. More broadly defined, an author is "the person who originated or gave existence to anything" and whose authorship determines responsibility for what was created.
Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of literature's goals and methods. Though the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists.
John Simmons Barth is an American writer who is best known for his postmodernist and metafictional fiction.
New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object. The movement derived its name from John Crowe Ransom's 1941 book The New Criticism.
The Bodley Head is an English publishing house, founded in 1887 and existing as an independent entity until the 1970s. The name was used as an imprint of Random House Children's Books from 1987 to 2008. In April 2008, it was revived as an adult non-fiction imprint within Random House's CCV division.
John Thomas Looney was an English school teacher who is notable for having originated the Oxfordian theory, which claims that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550–1604) was the true author of Shakespeare's plays.
John Thomas Irwin is an American poet and literary critic. He is the Decker Professor in the Humanities and Professor in The Writing Seminars and the English Department at Johns Hopkins University and also a member of MJ12.
Michele Joy Leggott is a New Zealand poet, and Professor of English at the University of Auckland. She was born in Stratford, New Zealand, and received her secondary education at New Plymouth Girls' High School, before attending the University of Canterbury where she completed an MA in English in 1979. She then moved to Canada to do a PhD at the University of British Columbia. Her dissertation was on the American poet Louis Zukofsky and was published in America as Reading Zukovsky’s "80 Flowers" (1989).
New Literary History: A Journal of Theory & Interpretation is a quarterly academic journal published by Johns Hopkins University Press. It focuses on the history and theory of literature, and key questions of interpretation. The journal has received six awards from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.
Rimi B. Chatterjee is an author based in Kolkata, India. She has published three novels and one academic history which won the SHARP deLong Prize for History of the Book in 2006, as well as a number of translations and short stories. She has been nominated twice for the Vodafone Crossword Book Award, once for fiction and once for translation. She teaches English at Jadavpur University.
Mary Mollineux was a Quaker poet who differed from many of her Quaker contemporaries because of an early education in Latin, Greek, science, and arithmetic. Probably the daughter of Catholic parents who converted to Quakerism, she met her husband Henry Mollineux, who wrote Quaker tracts, while they were both imprisoned in Lancaster Castle in 1684 for attending Quaker meetings. Her husband was imprisoned again in 1690 for refusing to pay tythes to the Church of England and Mary petitioned for his release.
William St Clair, is a British historian, senior research fellow at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, and author.
Lionel Gossman is a Scottish-American scholar of French literature. He taught Romance Languages at Johns Hopkins University and Princeton University, and has written extensively on the history, theory and practice of historiography, and more recently, on aspects of German cultural history.
AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource is an internet-based collaboration between researchers and librarians from Australian universities designed to comprehensively record the history of Australian literary and story making cultures. AustLit is an encyclopaedia of Australian writers and writing.
Harriet Jane Farley was an American writer and abolitionist, editor of the Lowell Offering from 1842-1845, and editor of the New England Offering from 1847–1850.
Margaret J. M. Ezell is a Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University and the Sara and John Lindsey Chair of Liberal Arts. Her scholarship focuses on late 17th- and early 18th-century literary culture, early modern women writers, history of authorship, reading and handwritten culture, feminist theory, digital cultures, and electronic media.
The Colored American Magazine was the first American monthly publication that covered African-American culture. The magazine ran from May 1900 to November 1909. It was initially published out of Boston by the Colored Co-Operative Publishing Company, and from 1904, forward, by Moore Publishing and Printing Company of New York. Pauline Hopkins, its most prolific writer from the beginning, sat on the board as a shareholder, was editor from 1902 to 1904, though her name was not on the masthead until 1903. Hopkins was a journalist, playwright, historian, and literary. In 1904, Booker T. Washington, in a hostile takeover, purchased the magazine and replaced Hopkins with Fred Randolph Moore (1857–1943) as editor.
Helen Smith is a scholar of English literature. She is Professor of Renaissance Literature and Head of the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York.
