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 boundaries of the book as they demonstrate how seldom the book's history as a material object is terminated at the moment of its manufacture. Other chapters highlight the provisionality that makes the book's conceptual boundaries fuzzy, unfinished, and variable; many seek to overturn triumphalist histories that recount the story of the book as though it were Western and white. Overall, this collection launches a new generation of scholarship as it introduces provocative new approaches about the nature, place, and time of books.

Over the last decade, as Jane Austen has moved center-stage in our culture, onto best-seller lists and into movie houses, another figure has slipped into the spotlight alongside her. This is the "Janeite," the zealous reader and fan whose devotion to the novels has been frequently invoked and often derided by the critical establishment. Jane Austen has long been considered part of a great literary tradition, even legitimizing the academic study of novels. However, the Janeite phenomenon has not until now aroused the curiosity of scholars interested in the politics of culture. Rather than lament the fact that Austen today shares the headlines with her readers, the contributors to this collection inquire into why this is the case, ask what Janeites do, and explore the myriad appropriations of Austen--adaptations, reviews, rewritings, and appreciations--that have been produced since her lifetime.

The articles move from the nineteenth-century lending library to the modern cineplex and discuss how novelists as diverse as Cooper, Woolf, James, and Kipling have claimed or repudiated their Austenian inheritance. As case studies in reception history, they pose new questions of long-loved novels--as well as new questions about Austen's relation to Englishness, about the boundaries between elite and popular cultures and amateur and professional readerships, and about the cultural work performed by the realist novel and the marriage plot.

The contributors are Barbara M. Benedict, Mary A. Favret, Susan Fraiman, William Galperin, Claudia L. Johnson, Deidre Lynch, Mary Ann O'Farrell, Roger Sales, Katie Trumpener, and Clara Tuite.

Enriching and complicating the history of fiction between Richardson and Fielding at mid-century and Austen at the turn of the century, this collection focuses on it-narratives, a once popular form largely forgotten by readers and critics alike, and advances important work on consumer culture and the theory of things. The contributors bring new texts—and new ways of thinking about familiar ones—to our notice. Topics range from period debates about copyright to the complex relationships with object-riddled sentimental fictions, from anti-Semitism in Chrysal to jingoistic imperialism in The Adventures of a Rupee. Essays situate it-narratives in a variety of contexts: changing attitudes toward occult powers, the development of still-life painting, the ethical challenges of pet ownership, the cult of Sterne and the appearance of genre fiction, the emergence of moral-didactic children’s literature, and a better-known tradition of Victorian thing-narratives. Stylistically and thematically consistent, the essays in this collection approach it-narratives from various theoretical and historical vantage points, sketching the cultural biography of a neglected literary form. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

The story of the development of the novel-its origin, rise, and increasing popularity as a narrative form in an ever-expanding range of geographic and cultural sites-is familiar and, according to the contributors to this volume, severely limited. In a far-reaching blend of comparative literature and transnational cultural studies, this collection shifts the study of the novel away from a consideration of what makes a particular narrative a novel to a consideration of how novels function and what cultural work they perform-from what novels are, to what they do. The essays in Cultural Institutions of the Novel find new ways to analyze how a genre notorious for its aesthetic unruliness has become institutionalized-defined, legitimated, and equipped with a canon. With a particular focus on the status of novels as commodities, their mediation of national cultures, and their role in transnational exchange, these pieces range from the seventeenth century to the present and examine the forms and histories of the novel in England, Nigeria, Japan, France, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. Works by Jane Austen, Natsume Soseki, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Buchi Emecheta, and Toni Morrison are among those explored as Cultural Institutions of the Novel investigates how theories of "the" novel and disputes about which narratives count as novels shape social struggles and are implicated in contests over cultural identity and authority.Contributors. Susan Z. Andrade, Lauren Berlant, Homer Brown, Michelle Burnham, James A. Fujii, Nancy Glazener, Dane Johnson, Lisa Lowe, Deidre Lynch, Jann Matlock, Dorothea von Mucke, Bridget Orr, Clifford Siskin, Katie Trumpener, William B. Warner