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Breaking the Book is a manifesto on the cognitive consequences and emotional effects of human interactions with physical books that reveals why the traditional humanities disciplines are resistant to 'digital' humanities.
* Explores the reasons why the traditional humanities disciplines are resistant to 'digital humanities'
* Reveals facets of book history, offering it as an example of how different media shape our modes of thinking and feeling
* Gathers together the most important book history and literary criticism concerning the hundred years leading up to the early 19th-century emergence of mass print culture
* Predicts effects of the digital revolution on disciplinarity, expertise, and the institutional restructuring of the humanities
List of contents
Acknowledgments vii
Advertisement ix
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
About the author
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.
Summary
Print Humanities in the Digital Age. Breaking the Book is a manifesto on the cognitive consequences and emotional effects of human interactions with physical books that reveals why the traditional humanities disciplines are resistant to digital humanities.
