Publishing, Literature, and Responsibility

Feminist book history scholars often count gender to analyse systemic gender inequality (Cooter and Women in Publishing 1987; ‘VIDA Count – VIDA: Women in Literary Arts’, n.d.; ‘The Prize Count · The Stella Prize’, n.d.; Lamond 2011; Harvey and Lamond 2016; 2019; Marsden 2019; Dane 2020).Following this work during my PhD, I collected and analysed quantitative gender data on literary production...

This paper will provide a comparative analysis of two texts from self-identified feminists that respond to the manosphere: Laura Bates’ Men Who Hate Women (2020) and Caitlin Moran’s What About Men? (2023). Feminist non-fiction for general audiences is one of the most significant sites of feminist activism with regard to the manosphere, with prominent feminists writing texts – aimed...

Children’s publishing is one of the sectors of the industry where the need for responsibility is felt most keenly. ‘Books offer children a way of exploring and understanding the world’, as artist Quentin Blake put it. Consequently, books for the young are amongst the most adapted and modified (Gouanvic, 2014).

This paper proposes the case of France to provide historical perspectives on...

In his Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-revolutionary France Darnton challenged the “big questions in history” regarding which books cause revolutions, or shall we say, are responsible for them? [xvii] He proposed to raise the query of a different order: what did the French actually read before the Revolution? In my contribution I suggest to ask what (and how?) did the Czechs read after the 1948...

From the late nineteenth century, Japanese publishers played a major role in making a wide variety of literature and scholarship available to a growing readership against the backdrop of modernization. As vehicles of ideas and mediators in debates, publishers struggled to gain respect amidst traditional suspicion of the book trade as a (literally and figuratively) dirty enterprise;...

In the cartelised setup of Anglophone trade book publishing, Indians can easily access books produced by UK and US publishers due to Commonwealth rights and multinationalisation in the publishing industry. However, it is not a two-way street: books written by Indian authors published by local Indian publishers or the Indian subsidiaries of multinational publishers often do not cross the...

In the context of the contemporary rise in labor mobilization and unionization in the U.S., the working conditions in the trade publishing industry have become openly discussed and politically challenged. The strike at the Harper Collins office in NYC in the winter of 2022/23 is probably the most prominent example of a vast array of labor actions ranging from unionizing efforts and working...

--- replacement input in the slot alloted to Prof. Koegler ---

To bookend our discussions, Corinna Norrick-Rühl will give a work-in-progress report for a handbook article she is writing for the German handbook "Handbuch Verlag" (Springer/JB Metzler, forthcoming) on (German) publishing & issues of representation.

Public Feelings, Published Feelings: Authorship and Responsibility in an Affective Industry"
This paper explores the intersection of authorship, responsibility, and feelings—both public and published. Its focus on affect is variegated across literary texts, particularly those who explicitly and often meta-textually deal with the publishing industry (e.g. Everett's Erasure, Kuang's Yellowface,...