Paper Kingdoms

'There is no end of writing of books in this scribbling age. Every man hath to show himself; to be counted a writer, to be thought and held a polymath, to get a paper kingdom...'

 

Robert Burton’s words, adapted from his sprawling work The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), register the author’s profound mixture of both awe and anxiety at the amount of printed matter that surrounded him. In this series, the idea that we must all fashion our own ‘paper kingdom’ becomes a cue to explore academic research and writing practice with some leading figures from early modern studies.

 

Each interview invites an academic to reflect on their own habits of work, covering a range of questions from the large – how to form project ideas? When is a book in fact an article? –to the small and particular – do you have a favourite time of day to write? Times Roman or Garamond? The interviews aim to launch conversations about how to be a productive writer and thinker within literary studies, and are particularly geared towards demystifying these processes for early career academics.

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9: tiffany stern

‘Something that helps me a lot is: ask the question next to the question that everyone else has been asking. See the main question with which everyone is preoccupied, and try asking the question next door.’

– Stratford-upon-Avon, May 2023

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8: zachary lesser

‘Writing about literature isn’t a feat of engineering. The fantasy is that you’re creating an argument that is so well constructed that it becomes this impregnable fortress. But then no-one can get in. And no-one cares.’

– Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, August 2021

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7: Jeffrey Todd Knight

‘I don’t think it’s a coincidence that book history has been reintegrated into literary disciplines at exactly the time we’ve learned we need to defend institutions again. In all these surveys about the decline of trust in journalism and law and education, it’s always the library that’s the last institution standing the public graces.’

– Seattle, Washington, March 2021

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6: Claire M. L. Bourne

‘It’s not that the book itself was ‘discovered’; it had been known since 1899. It’s that someone saw it with different eyes. The contexts that Jason brought to Milton’s copy of the First Folio was very different from the contexts that I brought. That’s what’s exciting about this story and it’s why collaboration should happen more often than it does.’

– University Park, Pennsylvania, October 2020

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5: Emma Smith

‘I’ve always felt that writing belongs somewhere in between teaching and talking about your work with friends. I don’t see it as a separate sphere from those other communicative forms. So I like the idea that you can code-switch a bit in academic writing, bring in something that’s seemingly more casual than the mannered academic prose we’ve all imbibed through graduate school.’

– Hertford College, Oxford, July 2020

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4: adam g. hooks

‘I have recently been pushed to the limit of something I’ve always believed in. Which is that the kinds of work we do as book historians and as bibliographers is fundamentally interpretive and imaginative. There is no split.’

– Iowa City, Iowa, May 2020

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3: Whitney trettien

‘For the longest time, book history was tethered to textual studies and editing and literary studies. Now it has become its own thing. So what do you do with the book when it’s no longer tied to an author or a specific text?’

– Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, March 2020

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2: Adam Smyth

‘I like that little pushback, which from the bibliographers will always ask for more rigour and detail, and for the literary people is a scepticism about why this matters. It’s good to keep that resistance.’

– Balliol College, Oxford, February 2020

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1: Bart van es

‘Does there need to remain a very clearly differentiated category of academic writing in a subject like literature, which is at least in part about beauty and literary affect?’

– St Catherine’s College, Oxford, January 2020

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