Breaking the Book: Print Humanities in the Digital Age

Breaking the Book  compares and contrasts the print with the digital revolution, emphasizing that those with one foot in manuscript and coterie print cultures have much to reveal to those of us who straddle mass print and new media.

Along with altering our notions of what constitutes a book, the transformation of the printed page to digital text has forced us to question long–held methodologies in literary criticism. In this new manifesto, noted media and digital humanities scholar Laura Mandell explores the cognitive consequences and emotional effects of human interactions with physical books, revealing why the traditional humanities disciplines are resistant to digital humanities. Provocative and timely, Breaking the Book opens an important new chapter on the liberating potential for digital media to revolutionize the fields of book history and the digital humanities. 

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Part I Pre–Bound 1

1 Language by the Book 3

Part II Bound 69

2 Print Subjectivity, or the Case History 71

3 Distributed Reading, or the Critic Filter 103

Part III Unbound 147

Conclusion 149

Works Cited 187

Index 205

Laura Mandell is Professor of English Literature and Director of the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture at Texas A & M University. Her publications include Misogynous Economies: The Business of Literature in Eighteenth–Century Britain (1999) and a Longman Cultural Edition of The Castle of Otranto and Man of Feeling.  Dr. Mandell is also Director of 18thConnect.org and General Editor of the Poetess Archive.