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. 17501850. 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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Changes understandings of the book as a medium, exploring Romantic-era works as open-ended collections of leaves, plates, and serials.
Introduction: material cultures of reading and collecting, 17501850;
1.
Walpole's book parts;
2. Blake's scattered leaves: composition, disorder, and
the dynamics of the book unbound;
3. Dickens unwrapped;
4. Coda: unbound,
disbound; Bibliography.
Luisa Calè writes about the visual and material cultures of reading, viewing, and collecting in the Romantic period, from literary galleries to extra-illustrations, altered books, periodical, and print culture. She is Exhibitions Editor for Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, Associate Editor at Word & Image. She works at Birkbeck, University of London.
