Op 3 en 11 mei organiseert de University of Münster twee openbare, online lezingen. De voertaal is Engels.
Ian Gadd (Bath Spa University) – ‘© Shakespeare‘ – 3 May
In February 1594, John Danter had his claim to the publishing rights to Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus approved by two of the officers of the London’s Stationers’ Company—and with this, the story of Shakespeare’s copyright begins. Gadd explores exactly what rights were being granted to Danter and those who followed him in securing the publishing rights to Shakespeare’s other works, and how those rights fundamentally shaped Shakespeare’s subsequent publishing history. By tracing the ownership of these rights from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries through to the late eighteenth century, the paper will demonstrate how any history of the emergence of modern Anglo-American copyright needs to understand the changing commercial realities of the London book trade as much as the more well known legislative and legal landmarks.
Ben Fried (Cornell University) – ‘The Penguin Empire: Publishing, Editing, and Reading the Global Anglophone’ – 11 May
This talk will tackle the worldwide expansion of Penguin Books, tracking the growth of its publishing empire through the second half of the twentieth century. How did Penguin gain and maintain its power? What have been the consequences of its commercial dominance, its shaping of texts and tastes, for writers and readers in English? Are individual authors and smaller publishers able to alter this institution, even as they are altered by it? I will discuss the Penguin Empire with particular reference to Penguin India and McPhee Gribble. The first, founded as a three-employee enterprise, has become the leading English-language publisher in South Asia; the second was a pioneering feminist press absorbed and discontinued by Penguin Australia. Each publisher’s greatest success, Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (1993) and Helen Garner’s The Children’s Bach (1983), testifies to the conditions that created them. Together, they will speak to the uses of publishing history as a framework for the disputed discipline of the Global Anglophone, one that can explain both what is illuminating and what is distorting about it.
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