Stevie Marsden’s Prizing Scottish Literature pieces together the history of one of Scotland’s oldest literary awards, which is granted by the Saltire Society. Despite the book’s emphasis on this little-known Scottish prize, Marsden’s case study serves as a useful point of comparison for scholars interested in how writers from peripheral and dominated nations achieve recognition.
Category: Book review
Freya Johnston. Jane Austen, Early and Late.
Freya Johnston’s Jane Austen, Early and Late reframes Austen’s work by reading the author’s juvenilia, short texts, and other so-called minor writing in conversation with her six major novels. Instead of establishing a clear hierarchy that progresses from more ephemeral writing to the well-known novels, Johnston treats all of Austen’s writing as connected and essential to understanding this major figure of literary history.
Beth Driscoll and Claire Squires. The Frankfurt Kabuff Critical Edition.
Four years after releasing their novella, The Frankfurt Kabuff, an erotic thriller set at the Frankfurt Book Fair, Beth Driscoll and Claire Squires (alias Blaire Squiscoll) have published this unique critical edition. Although its premise might suggest a lack of seriousness, The Frankfurt Kabuff Critical Edition is a scholarly piece of art.
Adam Gordon. Prophets, Publicists, and Parasites: Antebellum Print Culture and the Rise of the Critic.
Each chapter of Prophets, Publicists, and Parasites centers on a particular nineteenth-century American critic: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rufus Griswold, Edgar Allan Poe, Margaret Fuller, and Frederick Douglass. The book’s introduction contextualizes the critics’ historical moment as one in which growing nationalism, advances in printing technologies, and a productive economy enabled the emergence of the literary critic as a fully-fledged profession. These changes also encouraged the proliferation of literary criticism in a variety of print forms.
Jeff Jarvis. The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet.
In 2011, journalist and digital media expert Jeff Jarvis published Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live (New York: Simon & Schuster), a book that explores how the internet has created public spaces in which people can share their knowledge and experience. In The Gutenberg Parenthesis (2023), Jarvis turns his critical attention to the claim that formats of information sharing that have emerged in the digital age will wipe out preexisting literary traditions and institutions established during the age of print.