Conference: Print Culture Histories Beyond the Metropolis

FAIN: RZ-51453-12

Ball State University (Muncie, IN 47306-1022)
James John Connolly (Project Director: December 2011 to August 2014)

A conference, website, and volume of essays related to the history and development of print culture in smaller cities, towns, and rural areas worldwide. (15 months)

The Center for Middletown Studies, Ball State University, plans a conference to be held on March 15-16, 2013, in Muncie, Indiana. The title and theme for the conference is "Print Culture Histories Beyond the Metropolis," and its animating idea is to explore the ways that printed material was produced, consumed, circulated, and encountered in smaller cities, provincial districts, rural settings, colonial outposts, and comparable contexts. A considerable body of work explores print culture in metropolitan settings, and many of the theories about it derived from studies of such places. There is also a good deal of scholarship on print culture history outside major cities, but it is scattered and has not generated as much systematic analysis. Our conference begins to address that deficit by bringing a select group of scholars to explore how print culture took shape in nonmetropolitan contexts. The conference will generate a published volume and a free online video archive of all proceedings.

Associated Products

Print Culture Histories Beyond the Metropolis (Book)
Title: Print Culture Histories Beyond the Metropolis
Editor: James J. Connolly
Editor: Patrick Collier
Editor: Frank Felsenstein
Editor: Kenneth R. Hall
Editor: Robert G. Hall
Abstract: Bringing together leading scholars of literature, history, library studies, and communications, Print Culture Histories Beyond the Metropolis rejects the idea that print culture necessarily spreads outwards from capitals and cosmopolitan cities and focuses attention to how the residents of smaller cities, provincial districts, rural settings, and colonial outposts have produced, disseminated, and read print materials. Too often print media has been represented as an engine of metropolitan modernity. Rather than being the passive recipients of print culture generated in city centres, the inhabitants of provinces and colonies have acted independently, as jobbing printers in provincial Britain, black newspaper proprietors in the West Indies, and library patrons in “Middletown,” Indiana, to mention a few examples. This important new book gives us a sophisticated account of how printed materials circulated, a more precise sense of their impact, and a fuller of understanding of how local contexts shaped reading experiences.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/print-culture-histories-beyond-the-metropolis/oclc/953841525&referer=brief_results
Primary URL Description: WorldCat listing
Secondary URL: http://www.utppublishing.com/Print-Culture-Histories-Beyond-the-Metropolis.html
Secondary URL Description: Publisher's listing
Access Model: Book
Publisher: Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press
Type: Edited Volume
ISBN: 9781442650626
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

---