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This book contributes significantly to book, image and media studies from an interdisciplinary, comparative point of view. Its broad perspective spans medieval manuscripts to e-readers. Inventive methodology offers numerous insights into visual, manuscript and print culture: material objects relate to meaning and reading processes; images and texts are examined in varied associations; the symbolic, representational and cultural agency of books and prints is brought forward.
An introduction substantiates methods and approaches, ten chapters follow along media lines: from manuscripts to prints, printed books, and e-readers. Eleven contributors from six countries challenge the idea of a unified field, revealing the role of books and prints in transformation and circulation between varying cultural trends, ´high´ and ´low´. Mostly Europe-based, the collection offers book and print professionals, academics and graduates, models for future research, imaginatively combining material culture with archival data, cultural and reading theories with historical patterns.

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Chapter 1. Introduction: Evanghelia Stead.- Part I : Manuscripts as Cultural Objects.- Chapter 2. From Devotional Aids to Antiquarian Objects: The Prayer Books of Medingen - Henrike Lähnemann.- Chapter 3. How to Read the "Andachtsbüchlein aus der Sammlung Bouhier" (Montpellier, BU Médecine, H 396)? On Cultural Techniques Related to a 14th-century Devotional Manuscript- Henrike Manuwald.- Chapter 4. "Otium et negotium". Reading Processes in Early Italian and German Humanism - Michael Stolz.- Part II: Prints in Europe .- Chapter 5. The Fluidity of Images or the Compression of Media Diversity in Books: "Galeriewerke" and "Histoire Métallique" - Christina Posselt-Kuhli.- Chapter 6. Change of Use, Change of Public, Change of Meaning. Printed Images Travelling through Europe - Alberto Milano ().- Part III: Printed Books: Media, Objects, Uses.- Chapter 7. The Promotion of the Heroic Woman in Victorian and Edwardian Gift Book - Barbara Korte.- Chapter 8. "Pinocchio": an Adventure Illustrated over More than a Century (1883-2004) - Giorgio Bacci.- Chapter 9. Illustration and the Book as Cultural Object: Arthur Schnitzler´s Works in German and English Editions - Norbert Bachleitner.- Chapter 10. Two Peas in a Pod: Book Sales Clubs and Book Ownership in the Twentieth Century - Corinna Norrick-Rühl.- Epilogue.- Chapter 11. E-Readers and Polytextual Critique: On some Emerging Material Conditions in the Early Age of Digital Reading -Stephan Packard.

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Evanghelia Stead is Fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France and Comparative Literature Professor at the University of Versailles-Saint-Quentin (UVSQ), France. She runs the TIGRE seminar at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France. She has published extensively on print culture, iconography, reception, myth, the fin-de-siècle, and the ´Thousand and Second Night´ literary tradition.

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