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How the world became a book in Shakespeare's England / Jonathan P. Lamb, University of Kansas.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Lamb, Jonathan P., 1980- Author.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- English language--Early modern, 1500-1700--Style.
- English language.
- English language--Early modern, 1500-1700--Terms and phrases.
- Metaphor.
- Books--Terminology.
- Books.
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (xviii, 306 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).
- Edition:
- 1st ed.
- Place of Publication:
- Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2025.
- Summary:
- Human beings build their worlds using metaphors. Just as computer technology has inaugurated a massive metaphorical transformation in the present era, in which we can 'reboot' social causes or 'program' human behaviour, books spawned new metaphorical worlds in the newly print-savvy early modern England. Pamphleteers appealed to books to stage political attacks, preachers formulated theological claims using metaphors of page and binding, and scientists claimed to leaf through the 'Book of Nature'. Jonathan P. Lamb shows how, far from offering a mere a linguistic tool, this astonishingly broad lexicon did no less than teach entire cultures how to imagine, giving early modern writers - from Shakespeare to Cavendish, and from the famous to the anonymous - the language to describe and reshape the worlds around them. He reveals how, at a scale beyond anything scholars have imagined, bookish language shaped religious, political, racial, scientific, and literary questions that remain alive today.
- Contents:
- Cover
- Half-title page
- Reviews
- Title page
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures and Plates
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- A Note on Texts and Citations
- 1 An Introduction Is Like a Book
- 2 The Lexicon of Print
- Joseph Moxon at the Beginning of Modernity
- Printing in Poetry
- What We Talk about When We Talk about Bookishness
- "Set Forth" for All to See
- 3 The Metaphors We Read With
- The Book and Its Affordances
- The Book at Scale
- Understanding Man: Extensions of the Alphabet
- 4 Book Size and Information Management
- More Information on Information
- Premodern Book Size
- Big Books and Their Readers
- Comparative Format and Storage Space
- Capacity "in Folio"
- 5 The Bookish Sensorium
- Haptic Gestures
- Looks Like Printing
- Tastes Like Book Spirit
- 6 The World Is a Book
- The Book of Nature, Science, and Modernity
- How Many Books Are There?
- What Kind of Book Is the World?
- How Should We Read the Book of Nature?
- 7 When Print Was White
- The European Origins of the Art of Printing
- The European Distinctions of the Art of Printing
- The European Whiteness of the Art of Printing
- The Art of Printing, Turning over a New Leaf
- Bibliography
- Index.
- Notes:
- Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 08 Aug 2025).
- Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.
- ISBN:
- 1-009-46038-2
- 1-009-46039-0
- 1-009-46037-4
- OCLC:
- 1534170316
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