The Book Unbound
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- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
- Publication date:
- 13 December 2025
- 08 January 2026
- ISBN:
- 9781009599955
- 9781009599986
- Dimensions:
- (229 x 152 mm)
- Weight & Pages:
- 0.645kg, 330 Pages
- Dimensions:
- Weight & Pages:
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- Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
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Book description
How does our understanding of Romantic literature change when we shift the focus from bound books to unbound forms? Assumptions about the book as a bound object have isolated literature from overlapping material cultures of book making, reading, viewing, and collecting. The Book Unbound reconstructs a Romantic textual condition of unbound forms in which the book acted as a repository for open-ended collections of discrete book parts, prints, watercolours, manuscripts, and serial publications, ca. 1750–1850. Three case studies trace changing material practices of book making before and after publisher's bindings marked a turning point from a culture of unbound books. Through the restricted coterie gathered around Horace Walpole's private press at Strawberry Hill, William Blake's printmaker-poet's book making, and Charles Dickens's serialized part publications, this monograph changes understandings of the book as a medium.
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