Between about 1830 and the outbreak of the First World War, print culture, reading, and writing transformed cultural life in Western Europe in many significant ways. Book production and consumption increased dramatically, and practices such as letter- and diary-writing were widespread. This study demonstrates the importance of the nineteenth century in French cultural change and illustrates the changing priorities and concerns of l'histoire du livre since the 1970s.From th...

This book examines the fascinating survival of Andorra, one of Europe's micro-states nestled between France and Spain. Despite its medieval institutional framework, Andorra endured into the late 20th century without an army, police, currency, or customs barriers. The book uncovers how Andorra skilfully exploited its strategic position between two powerful neighbours, using its unique dual sovereignty to navigate the pressures of the modern nation-state era and secure its survival.E...

‘I am sir [sure] you will act as human bean’, wrote one distressed pensioner to Prime Minister Robert Menzies in 1953, pleading for assistance.Robert Menzies received 22,000 letters during his record-breaking 1949-1966 second term as Australian Prime Minister. From war veterans, widows and political leaders to school students and homespun philosophers. Ordinary citizens sent their congratulations and grievances and comment...

As war and mass emigration across oceans increased the distances between ordinary people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of them, previously barely literate and unaccustomed to writing, began to communicate on paper. This fascinating account explores this surge of ordinary writing, how people met the new challenges of literacy and the importance of scribal culture to the history of individual experience in modern Europe. Focusing on correspondence and other writi...

This book captures the intensity of the relationship between writers and their typewriters from the 1880s, when the machine was first commercialized, to the 1980s, when word-processing superseded it. Drawing on examples from the United States, Britain, Europe, and Australia, The Typewriter Century focuses on "celebrity writers," including Henry James, Jack Kerouac, Agatha Christie, Georges Simenon, and Erle Stanley Gardner, who wrote prolifically and mechanically, developing routi...

This Palgrave Pivot examines the history of literacy with illiterate and semi-literate people in mind, and questions the clear division between literacy and illiteracy which has often been assumed by social and economic historians. Instead, it turns the spotlight on all those in-between, the millions who had some literacy skills, but for whom reading and writing posed difficulties. Its main focus is on those we have often labelled ‘illiterates’, rather than those who enjoyed full competenc...

This original study examines different incarnations of the Pyrenees, beginning with the assumptions of 18th-century geologists, who treated the mountains like a laboratory, and romantic 19th-century tourists and habitués of the spa resorts, who went in search of the picturesque and the sublime. The book analyses the individual visions of the heroic Pyrenees which in turn fascinated 19th-century mountaineers and the racing cyclists of the early Tour de France. Martyn Lyons also inv...

This book investigates the history of writing as a cultural practice in a variety of contexts and periods. It analyses the rituals and practices determining intimate or ‘ordinary’ writing as well as bureaucratic and religious writing. From the inscribed images of ‘pre-literate’ societies, to the democratization of writing in the modern era, access to writing technology and its public and private uses are examined. In ten studies, presented by leading historians of scribal culture from seve...

Art historians have long been accustomed to thinking about art and artists in terms of national traditions. This volume takes a different approach, suggesting instead that a history of art based on national divisions often obscures the processes of cultural appropriation and global exchange that shaped the visual arts of Europe in fundamental ways between 1492 and the early twentieth century.Essays here analyze distinct zones of contact — between various European states, between As...

All cities are multilingual, but there are some where language relations have a special importance. These are cities where more than one historically rooted language community lays claim to the territory of the city. This book focuses on four such linguistically divided cities: Calcutta, Trieste, Barcelona, and Montreal.Though living with the ever-present threat of conflict, these cities offer the possibility of creative interaction across competing languages and this book examines...

No city more than Paris has had such a constant and deep association with the development of literary forms and cultural ideas. The idea of the city as a space of literary self-consciousness started to take hold in the sixteenth century. By 1620, where this volume begins, the first in a long line of extraordinary works of the human imagination, in which the city represented itself to itself, had begun to find form in print. This collection follows that process through to the present day. B...

In this authoritative and accessible account of French literature, sixteen essays by leading specialists offer provocative insights into French literary culture, its genres, movements, themes, and historic turning points, including the cultural and linguistic challenges of today's multi-ethnic France. The French have, over the centuries, invented and reinvented writing, from the Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes to Montaigne's Essays, which gave the world a new literary form and a n...