The history of the book as a field of study within the humanities: A retrospect, and a prospect by Graham Shaw

Abstract

This article outlines the development of the history of the book not only as an academic discipline in its own right but as a field of study of critical, potentially central, importance for the advancement of the humanities in general. The history of the book helps revise the earlier relative marginalisation of cultural vis-à-vis political history. The publication in 1958 of L’apparition du livre by Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin has been followed by a series of multivolume, multi-authored national histories of the book and libraries, first in France, then in Britain, the United States and elsewhere. The history of book is having considerable influence in many areas of historical investigation, such as general history, literary history, the history of science and the history of religion. With the ‘Digital Revolution’, the history of the book is now converging with studies of the other media and, together with the growth of postcolonial/post-imperial studies in general, offers the prospect of a balanced and nuanced approach within the global academy to understanding the world’s media past, present and future.

An analysis of publishing studies journals: An insight into the structure of the field based on publications

“…Interest in publishing studies (PS) has been steadily increasing since the 1970s and 1980s when vocational courses and higher education publishing programmes first evolved. However, the industry‐oriented profile of PS has relegated it to the margins of academia and its close links to well established disciplines depriving it of autonomy (Black et al, 1998; Migoń, 1984; Stepanova, 2007; Willison, 2018). The multiple focusses of PS bring it closer to a number of allied disciplines: the form and social function of book to book studies, books as symbolic goods and their socio‐economic context to sociology of culture and its subfield, sociology of literature, the genesis of literary creativity and readers' response to literary studies and psychology, the transfer of information and knowledge and its management to information science.…”