Utopia Fading: Taxonomies,Freedom and Dissent in Open Access Publishing

This essay focuses on some of Mayhew's interviews in London Labour and the London Poor, and especially his interview with one coster-girl. Do these sources express the lived experience of a speaking subject; or do they merely rehearse contemporary cultural and linguistic codes? There is no subject without language; language precedes and determines the subject, but nor is there language without subjects. Language exists only insofar as individuals and groups utilize it, reproduce it and transform it – and always within specific social relations and networks of power and in a relentlessly material world. Mayhew's writings provide a wonderful resource to explore some of these complex struggles over meaning – in a precise time and place.     

Printing,Publishing, and Book Culture in Premodern China

Abstract

After a lull in scholarship on the history of the Chinese book during the mid-twentieth century, there has been a reemerging surge of scholarly interest since the 1980s. This article accesses the expanding field of Chinese book history by focusing on two recently published volumes, which represent the newest approaches to the study of Chinese printing in the first significant phase of its development from the tenth to the fourteenth century and its long-term role in Chinese social and intellectual history after 1800, respectively. Placing them in the broader historical context, it further seeks to flesh out recent research trends and future prospects in the field, in particular the changing social and intellectual engagement with printed texts, the increasing impact of printing and publishing on cultural production, and the dynamic interaction between print and other media.