The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature (PMLA, January 2006)

PMLA is the journal of the Modern Language Association of America. Since 1884, PMLA has published members' essays judged to be of interest to scholars and teachers of language and literature. Four issues each year (January, March, May, and October) present essays on language and literature; a Directory issue (September) contains a listing of the association's members, a directory of departmental administrators, and other professional information; and the November issue is the program for the association's annual convention. Each issue of PMLA is sent directly to the nearly 30,000 college and university teachers of English and foreign languages who belong to the association and to about 3,000 libraries throughout the world.

January 2006 (Volume 121, Number 1)

Special Topic:  The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature - Coordinated by Seth Lerer and Leah Price

Leah Price, Introduction: Reading Matter

Jody Greene, Francis Kirkman's Counterfeit Authority: Autobiography, Subjectivity, Print

Coleman Hutchison, Breaking the Book Known as Q

Matthew P. Brown, The Thick Style: Steady Sellers, Textual Aesthetics, and Early Modern Devotional Reading

Paula McDowell, Defoe and the Contagion of the Oral: Modeling Media Shift in A Journal of the Plague Year

Lorraine Piroux, The Encyclopedist and the Peruvian Princess: The Poetics of Illegibility in French Enlightenment Book Culture

Andrew Piper, Rethinking the Print Object: Goethe and the Book of Everything

Alexander Des Forges, Burning with Reverence: The Economics and Aesthetics of Words in Qing (1644-1911) China

Beth A. McCoy, Race and the (Para)Textual Condition

John G. Nichols, Ezra Pound's Poetic Anthologies and the Architecture of Reading

Evan Brier, Constructing the Postwar Art Novel: Paul Bowles, James Laughlin, and the Making of The Sheltering Sky

Alice Brittan, War and the Book: The Diarist, the Cryptographer, and The English Patient

Peter D. McDonald, Ideas of the Book and Histories of Literature: After Theory?

Seth Lerer, Epilogue: Falling Asleep over the History of the Book

Little-Known Documents

Are Too Many Books Written and Published? (1927), Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf. Introduction by Melba Cuddy-Keane

Marie of the Cabin Club (1939), Ann Petry. Introduction by Gene Jarrett

Theories and Methodologies

Linda Martín Alcoff, The Unassimilated Theorist

Debra A. Castillo, Anzaldúa and Transnational American Studies

María Herrera-Sobek, Gloria Anzaldúa: Place, Race, Language, and Sexuality in the Magic Valley

Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Bridging Islands: Gloria Anzaldúa and the Caribbean

Tey Diana Rebolledo, Prietita y el Otro Lado: Gloria Anzaldúa's Literature for Children

Ivy Schweitzer, For Gloria Anzaldúa: Collecting America, Performing Friendship

Silvia Spitta, The Contingencies of Life and Reading: Para Gloria

Ian Barnard, Judith Butler, John DeFrancis, Harold Fromm, James D. Hoff, Burton Pike, Robert Scholes, and Gang Zhou, Forum

Minutes of the MLA Executive Council

In Memoriam

Index of Advertisers

Index of Authors Advertised

Abstracts