Brayman Lander and Lesser 2016

Brayman, Heidi, Jesse M. Lander, and Zachary Lesser, eds. The Book in History, The Book as History: New Intersections of the Material Text. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.

Introduction

"The history of the book thus provides an alternative to the New Historicist mode of reading text as discourse, shifting attention from the freeform 'circulation of social energy' to a more rooted understanding of text a objects produced by particular people in particular circumstances to speak to particular audiences." (13)

second-wave book history seeks "to expicate how texts work rhetorically in the world, as events rather than discourses." (13)

Alan B. Farmer, "Playbooks and the Question of Ephemerality" (87-125)

become common to assume playbooks were ephemeral documents; using data analysis to reassess "the presumed relationsnhip between cultural and bibliographical ephemerality, in which texts of low cultural value are thought to have been printed poorly and subsequently treated by readers as disposable artifacts. In fact, there are good reasons to question this narrative. Cultural ephemerality is best seen as a discursive category shaped by ideological commitments and prejudices, whereas bibliographical ephemerality is a material category affected by a publication's physical characteristics; both of these could affect how readers subsequently handled publications, but neither absolutely determined whether a book would be destroyed or preserved. In the case of playbooks, whatever early modern readers may have thought about printed drama, these publications were not particularly ephemeral." (90)