The Materiality of Literature

What does the way paper is made or how books are printed have to do with the way one reads and interprets Shakespeare’s Tempest, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Eliot’s Middlemarch, or Larsen’s Quicksand? This question gets at the core of an evolving methodological, theoretical, and critical movement in literary studies, variously called “book history,” “material text studies,” or “critical bibliography.” Put very bluntly, this interdisciplinary approach to literature, philosophy, art history, the history of science—pretty much every humanities field that exists today—is grounded in the study of books, magazines, manuscripts, films, photographs, etc. as material objects. The foundational concept is that you cannot fully, or even rightly, understand the content any scribal, printed or digital text or image if you don’t pay attention to its medium—the physical container through which we receive ideas. This is the foundational claim we will explore and debate in the coming semester, as we learn research methods that will expand, but also change, the way you think about literature.