Abstract
The introduction explains the central claims of the book: print trade professionals exerted agency to articulate regional identity in the hand press period; they also shaped the development of the regional book and print trades. Part of this book’s intent is a realignment of the dominant terminology used to discuss the book and print trades outside of London, away from the ‘provincial’ and towards the ‘regional’. The introduction therefore establishes the historical context for the chapters that follow and sets out the implications of the terminology. It then goes on to define the book’s key concepts—regionality and agency—before locating them in the existing scholarship. Finally, it summarises the individual chapters.
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Notes
- 1.
The section of this book that the woodcut is in has no pagination, but it is on the first page of the backmatter. Rachel Stenner discusses Gent in Chap. 3.
- 2.
All of this symbolism is typical of the ‘typographic imaginary’ that Stenner delineates; for discussion see Stenner (2019, 32–55).
- 3.
Though see (with an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century focus) Hinks and Archer-Parré (2020).
- 4.
For more on medieval English book production see Gillespie and Wakelin (2011).
- 5.
On the distribution of London books during this period, see Capp (2014).
- 6.
- 7.
Cf. Beavan (2009).
- 8.
Cf. Cawood and Peters (2019), a recent work that shares our study’s emphasis on the ‘regional identity of the provincial press’ (6), but whose title, Print, Politics, and the Provincial Press in Modern Britain retains the idea of provinciality.
- 9.
As is suggested by the career of the Irish printer Gent, whose professional life spanned Dublin, London, and York, a related perspective useful for book and print trade history is the archipelagic. This approach frames the United Kingdom and Ireland not as a group of nations, but as the Atlantic Archipelago (see Schwyzer and Mealor 2004).
- 10.
We theorise the concept of agency below.
- 11.
Cf. Victoria Gardner’s description of the eighteenth-century newspaper proprietor as a communications broker (Gardner 2016, 5).
- 12.
- 13.
For another spatial model, cf. Andrew Pettegree’s understanding of the continental European trade as a ‘series of concentric circles’ (2008, 105).
- 14.
See Law (2005) for an example of this approach.
- 15.
Cf. Raymond Williams’ discussion of the intertwining of region and class in the novel form, where the regional relates to ‘that close living substance’ in contrast to ‘what is now happening, through etiolation, in metropolitan and bourgeois fiction’ (1983, 238).
- 16.
A detailed overview of the changing history of these concepts and their relationship in sociological criticism, with consideration of the implications of their usage on historical scholarship, can be found in Sewell (2005).
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Stenner, R., Smith, A.J. (2022). Introduction: Print Culture, Agency, Regionality. In: Stenner, R., Kramer, K., Smith, A.J. (eds) Print Culture, Agency, and Regionality in the Hand Press Period . New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88055-2_1
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