Call for Papers on Book History and Publishing Studies in Australia and New Zealand

We invite essay submissions for a special issue of Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian and New Zealand Literature about book history and publishing studies in Australia and New Zealand. This special issue will be guest edited by Per Henningsgaard (Curtin University). The submission deadline is October 1, 2021. Essays should be 5,500–7,000 words in length and follow the latest MLA citation style and Antipodes guidelines.

Book history, which had its beginnings in France with the annales school of historians, is a field devoted to studying the creation, dissemination and reception of texts. From its geographically circumscribed origins, ‘the discipline spread to England and Germany in the 1960s and 1970s and began to make its appearance in [the United States], as a formally recognized field of study, in the late 1970s’ (West 2006). Until the mid-1980s, however, there remained two distinct book history methodologies: the French school which examined ‘the impact of the book on society’ and culture, and the Anglo-American school which was ‘primarily bibliographical, and concerned with the book as a physical object’ (Antonetti 2006).

Australia and New Zealand have only one scholarly journal devoted to book history: Script & Print: Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand, which has been consistently publishing issues since 1970. Script & Print has a mandate in the area of physical bibliography – the ‘technical analysis of individual books or editions characteristic of bibliography’ (Finkelstein and McCleery 2006). This mandate hinders its engagement with more recent interest in book history, which is increasingly concerned with matters foreign to physical bibliography but comfortably accommodated within the critical framework espoused by the French school of book history. It also means that Script & Print has remained relatively isolated from one of the most exciting developments in book history in Australia and New Zealand, which is the growth in ‘scholarly research into contemporary publishing … alongside the growth in universities of largely vocational training programs for aspiring book industry professionals in the 1990s and 2000s’ (Weber and Mannion 2017). Consequently, much of the best, most innovative research about book history and publishing studies in Australia and New Zealand has been published in international journals with no connection to Australasia or Australasian culture – or it can be found like an island in the sea of an Australian or New Zealand journal of media or literary studies.

This special issue seeks to draw together a diverse range of essays about book history and publishing studies in Australia and New Zealand, with an emphasis on social history. By bringing these essays together in a special issue of a journal devoted to Australasian literature and culture, we hope to put them in conversation with one another, thus capturing a unique moment in Australasian cultural history.

Please contact the guest editor Per Henningsgaard (P.Henningsgaard@curtin.edu.au) with any questions. All essays must be submitted through the journal’s website (see below) and will go through double-blind peer review and editorial evaluation, as per the journal’s standard policy. Antipodes is published by Wayne State University Press. More information about the journal and submission process can be found at https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/antipodes/

Antipodes CFP - Book history and publishing studies.pdf

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