Tracing multivalent words of nineteenth-century French print culture

The production of printed text changed radically over the course of the nineteenth century: Everything from the material used to make paper to the gender of the people assembling books shifted. Examining ten key terms as they took on new meanings in the world of print, Cary Hollinshead-Strick shows how the words, borrowed to name technical transformations, reveal the social expectations surrounding the birth of industrial print culture. Through these homonyms she connects papermaking to both Renaissance ceramics and fin-de-siècle japonisme, reveals the politics behind typos and the reasons women went to work in Parisian suburbs, shows how newspaper formats mapped onto rural and urban forms of entertainment and food, and explores the fantasy that information itself could be gathered and distributed in reliable, comprehensive ways.

By lingering over the resonances set in motion when ordinary words like canard and filet became terms for modern media formats, this book situates communication practices in the social, economic, and political environments that gave rise to them. This innovative approach not only elucidates nineteenth-century French print culture’s influence on the literature of the period but also invites us to consider the relationships between contemporary forms of information, media, labor, and language.

CARY HOLLINSHEAD-STRICK is an associate professor in the Department of Comparative Literature, English, and Creative Writing at the American University of Paris.

Introduction: Protes    

Chapter 1. Pâte           

Chapter 2. Feuille       

Chapter 3. Coquille     

Chapter 4. Plieuse       

Chapter 5. Canard      

Chapter 6. Marronnier           

Chapter 7. Arlequin    

Chapter 8. Filet           

Epilogue: Liseuses

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography