Symbolic Caxton

Symbolic Caxton is the first study to explore the introduction of printing in symbolic terms. It presents a powerful literary history in which the fifteenth century is crucial to the overall story of English literature. William Kuskin argues that the development of print production is part of a larger social network involving the political, economic, and literary systems that produce the intangible constellations of identity and authority. For Kuskin, William Caxton (1422–1491), the first English printer, becomes a unique lens through which to view these issues. Kuskin contends that recognizing the fundamental complexity inherent in the transformation from manuscript to print—the power of literature to formulate its audience, the intimacy of capital and communication, the closeness of commodities and identity—makes possible a clear understanding of the way cultural, bibliographical, financial, and technological instruments intersect in a process of symbolic production. While this book is the first to connect the contents of late medieval literature to its technological form, it also speaks to contemporary culture, wrestling with our own paradigm shift in the relationship between literature and technology.

“Kuskin's writing is richly associative, animated by an energetic eclecticism of reference. This wide-ranging approach is suited to the book's goals, since the importance of considering all these aspects of books together, of uniting the material and sociocultural history of books with the critical study of the literary texts inside them, is one of Kuskin's central contentions. It is hoped that this conceptually complex and valuable study finds an audience with both literary critics and historians.” —Renaissance Quarterly, “In Symbolic Caxton, William Kuskin describes the introduction of printing from a material culture perspective and looks at the impact of mass production and patronage on the consumption of Caxton’s books.” —Year’s Work in English Studies, “William Kuskin’s new study of Caxton’s career, and his significance in English literary history, grows directly from the essays assembled in his edited collection Caxton’s Trace. . . . Kuskin has read all the relevant literature and is keen to engage with it. His arguments are also enhanced with copious and appealing illustrations.” —Speculum, “The 2006 anthology of essays he edited, Caxton's Trace: Studies in the History of English Printing, articulated some implications of 15th-century printing. Kuskin presents a companion volume exploring the dynamic nature of culture during the last quarter of the century, which he finds less thoroughly studied than other literary periods.” —Research Book News, “Kuskin’s Symbolic Caxton offers an important and thorough reading of Caxton that considers the importance of examining the historical nature of English literary culture along with the symbolic forms that same culture took as it developed.” —Arthuriana

William Kuskin is associate professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the editor of Caxton’s Trace: Studies in the History of English Printing (University of Notre Dame Press, 2006).