This project aims to wrest literary critics' attention away from the fraction of its lifecycle that any book spends (if it’s lucky) in the hands of readers, toward the whole spectrum of social practices for which printed matter provides a prompt. Bought, sold, exchanged, transported, displayed, defaced, stored, ignored, collected, neglected, dispersed, discarded, books can be enlisted – to state the obvious – in a range of transactions that stretch far beyond the literary or even the linguistic. Her talk will ask, more specifically, how the Victorians invented spam: what distribution networks they developed to distribute printed matter that (whether its content was commercial or religious) changed hands via some transaction more complex than impersonal buying and selling.
Leah Price is Professor of English at Harvard University, where she also holds the Harvard College Professorship. She teaches the novel, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British culture, narrative theory, gender studies, and the history of books and reading. Price is Humanities Program Director at the Radcliffe Institute; she also directs (with Ann Blair, Robert Darnton, and David Hall) the faculty seminar on the History of the Book at the Harvard Humanities Center. Her books include Hiow to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain, Unpacking my Library: Writers and their Books, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel and Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture, co-edited with Pamela Thurschwell; she edited (with Seth Lerer) the special issue of PMLA on The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature. She also writes on old and new media for the New York Times Book Review, theLondon Review of Books, and the Boston Globe. Price's next project, Reading for Life, explores the burden of books in the digital age.
