Each of our four panelists will present presentations between 12 to 15 minutes in length, which leaves between 15-27 minutes for discussion. Panelists will also circulate their papers in advance to facilitate scholarly discussion following the presentations. Here are brief descriptions of the individual presentations.
“Books and Bodies” – Jessica Jordan, Stanford University
At the turn of the twentieth century, books – mechanisms of social mobility, sources of both religious authority and indecorous pleasure – were crowding Americans at every turn, in railway stations, department stores, and in the hands of eager booksellers. This period of abundance was a moment when the book’s long history of seeming like a person (a friend, teacher, or companion with a consciousness of its own) manifested materially, reminding readers that if the book has a mind, it also has a body to contain it: the physical form of the book.
In this paper Jordan will sketch how they have used this approach in their own work and will suggest how these ideas work in concert with other recent theories from the emergent field of critical bibliography.
“Minding our Ps and Zs” – Andrea Thomas. Loyola University Maryland
Arguably the first publicist in the modern sense, Zola, with the help of Lacroix, engaged with the anxieties of consumerism and overproduction in French publishing in multiple ways: innovating publicity techniques for bourgeois readers, pioneering payment by royalties, and using his newspaper column to challenge assumptions about issues ranging from censorship to money in literature. Within his novels, he responded to market demands by narrativizing modern consumer culture and science through the Naturalist method. On a second level, this paper aims to address how literary critics and textual scholars might mutually benefit from blurring the boundaries that have separated them since the material-ideal divide.
“Dust, Dirt, and Debris” - Nikita Willeford Kastrinos, University of Washington
Pursuing an ecological investigation of the late-Victorian novel through the case study of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Kastrinos examines how the novel’s thematic engagement with dust and debris connects to late-Victorian London’s consumption of domestic and industrial coal. Looking to the novel’s bibliographic form, Kastrinos consider the dustiness of its extant “yellowback” copies, arguing that they serve as material archives of the environmental degradation this pollution wrought. In so doing, the presenter will broaden the parameters of the growing field of eco-book studies as they bring its scrutiny of the textual artifact in conversation with perspectives from environmental literary criticism in pursuit of the book object’s ecological embedding.
“The Convergence of Book History and Art History” - Nanjun Zhou, University of Texas
Through the cases of Ernst Barlach and Frans Masereel (1889–1972), artists tied to writers and publishers yet marginal to canonical Expressionism, this study examines how print media actively shaped artistic practice and redefined audience engagement. Masereel’s narrative-driven woodcuts – often cited as precursors to the graphic novel – blurred the lines between artistic, literary, and mass-market publishing. Ultimately, this study argues that publication was not merely a vehicle for disseminating German Expressionism but a structural force in its very formation, requiring a reconfiguration of book history’s conceptual boundaries.
These panelists, along with our presider and moderator, Dr. John Young, current President of the Society for Textual Scholarship, represent advanced scholars, post-doctoral investigators, and two PhD candidates. We consider this group to be an effective representation of a diversity of scholarly voices, academic levels, and mix of genders.