Preface Préface

The 2015 CSECS/SCEDHS conference in Vancouver brought together over 170 scholars from Canada, the US, Europe, and South America to consider the conference theme “The States of the Book,” taking up questions related to how print in all its forms influenced and was shaped by the long eighteenth century. Literacy, the book trade, readership, the sociability of texts, and the interplay of print and manuscript are often pursued within more narrow confines, such as London’s Grub Street or the decade of the 1740s, but the internationality of the conference made it possible to consider these issues on a global scale. Special features of CSECS/SCEDHS 2015 included a reception at Simon Fraser University’s Woodwards campus featuring Steve Collis’s reading of a poem “Home at Gasmere”; a performance of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French and German lute music; and a tour of sites in Vancouver’s Stanley Park meaningful to Indigenous peoples in the eighteenth century and earlier. The first of our keynote speakers, Professor Roger Chartier of the Collège de France and the University of Pennsylvania, is one of the most influential scholars of the “States of the Book” for his work on the book as material object embedded in social and cultural history. From his seminal text The Order of Books to his recent studies of the physical circulation and changing meanings of European works such as Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Las Casas’ La destruyción de las Indias, Chartier demonstrates how the early modern book dictates its modes of consumption and the systems of knowledge that contain it. We are honoured to have the opportunity to feature in this volume Chartier’s plenary address, entitled “Materiality of the Text and Expectations of Reading: Congruence or Conflict?” In this article, Chartier challenges structuralist and reader-response theories of textuality and interpretation on the one hand, and the new bibliography on the other, for reinforcing the separation of the physical book from the “text.” We must rather, he argues, insist on the expressivity of the material text itself, on the porosity of boundaries between author, printer, and reader in the creation of the text, and on the power of material forms of the book to engender interpretations and reinterpretations. Putting such interpretive principles to work, Professor Janine Barchas of the University of Texas at Austin has published a wide range of scholarship that painstakingly traces the connections between material objects and literary meaning. In Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel, Barchas considers how paratexts such as title pages, ornaments, and indexes fostered the development of the novel as an independent genre. Her second book, Matters of Fact in Jane Austen, interprets Austen as a historically-informed, celebrity-watching writer who chose real names, events, and locations based on her own research. “What Jane Saw,” an innovative digital humanities project, opens up even further interpretive possibilities for Austen as it reveals what paintings she would have seen during her visits to London’s Shakespeare Gallery in 1796 and to the Sir Joshua Reynolds exhibition in 1813. At CSECS/SCEDHS, Barchas delivered a ground-breaking plenary talk, “The Lost Books of Austen Studies,” in which she convincingly dismantled the commonly-held belief that R.W. Chapman was Austen’s first critical editor. The talk produced audible gasps, tears, and a sustained standing ovation with the audience realizing that Barchas had corrected a long-standing mistake in Austen studies and given a forgotten heroine her due. The conference’s thirty-four panels on book history and print culture spanned geographies, genres, practices, and textual forms. Geographies ranged from the broad – the Canadian North, the Transatlantic, and prerevolutionary France – to the specific: books in …