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Book Studies

  

    

 Urizen reveals his Book of Brass by William blake, 1794Book studies specialists in the English department provide an exciting, interdisciplinary approach to literary and cultural history. Focusing on the production, transmission, and circulation of texts in their scribal, print, and digital media, we are interested in the physical properties of word and image in the book format. We examine a welter of cultural records -- scrolls, codices, broadsides, pamphlets, periodicals, collages, websites -- in order to measure the shifting historical meanings of authorship, publication, and reception. Book specialists further assess the impact of a text's materiality on audiences and publics; on constructions of gender, race, and class; and on theories of art, information, and collection. Students benefit from the University of Iowa's Center for the Book, a distinctive multidisciplinary unit with expertise in the craft and history of books.


•African American
•Book Studies
•British Romantic
•Creative Nonfiction Writing
•Early American Studies
•18th & 19th C. British
•Food Studies
•Gender & Sexuality
•Medieval & Early Modern
•Modernist Studies
•New Media
•Nonfiction
•19th-Century US Literatures
•The Novel & Short Fiction
•Religion, Secularism & Ethics
•Science & Technology
•Shakespeare & Renaissance
•Transnational & Postcolonial
•Victorian & Edwardian
•Visual Culture

 

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Recent Book Studies Classes

8:332 Victorian Periodicals and Their Readers
A course considering who the readers of Victorian periodicals and fiction in periodicals were and how mass literacy affected the formation of periodical culture and values; how editors and writers perceived their role in Victorian culture; and how scholars can draw upon periodical literature when interested in reading practices, rhetorical style, literary issues, social problems, and interdisciplinary study

8:458 Whitman
A seminar that, in part, concerns Leaves of Grass as a series of physical objects, with work in the main library's Special Collections department to discuss material aspects of the various editions.

8:247 American Literary Magazines: 19th Century
From the new republic's city journals to Jacksonian giftbooks, from antislavery forums to august quarterly reviews, from regional periodicals to fin-de-siècle dime monthlies, this course investigates the trafficked intersections of literary texts, analyzing the historical moment, cultural innovation, and marketplace demand to which American magazines gave rise.

8:131/108:181 Literature and the Book: Medieval Literature and the Book
A course that considers medieval literature in light of its material survival. Students examine three major English medieval works and the makeup of the medieval manuscript book in order to tackle one principal question: what is the significance and value of the physical book for an understanding of literature?

8:134/108:184 Introduction to Book Studies
An introduction to the theory and practice of book studies. Students attend to the varied meanings of word and image in the book format, through comparative study of other media and through applied study of the codex as a physical artifact.
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