Inscription and Erasure
Subtitle: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century (Material Texts)
Contributors: Arthur Goldhammer (Translator)
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: March 2007
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 224
ISBN-13: 9780812239959
Subjects: Palaeography (history of writing); Books & Reading; Literacy; Literary Criticism & Collections / Books & Reading; Literary Criticism; Language Arts / Linguistics / Literacy; History; Printing; Social aspects; Transmission of texts; Written communication
Description: "The fear of oblivion obsessed medieval and early modern Europe. Stone, wood, cloth, parchment, and paper all provided media onto which writing was inscribed as a way to ward off loss. And the task was not easy in a world in which writing could be destroyed, manuscripts lost, or books menaced with destruction. Paradoxically, the successful spread of printing posed another danger, that an uncontrollable proliferation of textual materials, of matter without order or limit, might allow useless texts to multiply and smother thought. Not everything written was destined for the archives; indeed, much was written on surfaces that allowed one to write, erase, then write again."

"In Inscription and Erasure, Roger Chartier seeks to demonstrate how the tension between these two concerns played out in the imaginative works of their times. Chartier examines how authors transformed the material realities of writing and publication into an aesthetic resource exploited for poetic, dramatic, or narrative ends."--Jacket.