Call for Papers: Print Culture in Croatia

[Marija Dalbello]

Call for Papers

Print Culture in Croatia: The Canon and the Borderlands

Special Issue (Vol. 48 / 2005): Vjesnik bibliotekara Hrvatske

Guest editors: Marija Dalbello and Tinka Katic

The study of books and printing has moved beyond the study of book as
technological artifact, carrier of literary canon, or aesthetic object.
The study of print culture is extended to the study of the production,
circulation and use of print in a total environment of social, political,
and economic forces.  The total history of the book has moved to the
forefront of cultural history research as an interdisciplinary arena of
scholarship.

The special issue of the Croatian Library Journal, a refereed
international journal, is soliciting manuscripts for a topical issue to be
published in the fall 2005 that focuses on print culture in Croatia based
on primary source materials. Innovative research and theoretical
approaches are encouraged. The issue is meant to explore the concept of
the print tradition on the borderlands, as continuities and
discontinuities at the boundaries of the Croatian national print culture.

The research of print culture in Croatia has traditionally been in the
function of the study of a national literary canon focusing on the
Croatian vernacular, the native print tradition during the hand-press era,
and Croatian participation in the centers of European book trade. Although
Croatian print tradition is a participant of a larger European tradition
of print culture, it also represents a field of interaction between the
East and West and the breeding-ground of European Orientalism. We would
like to explore a perspective that reorganizes the canon.

We seek some of the following types of contributions:

* Writing cultures / reading cultures
* Counter-systems and propagandist uses of print (censorship, Croatian
Protestant books, underground publishing)
* Croatian vernacular and literatures in German, Italian and Latin *
Visual genres / textual genres
* Orality / literacy
* Regional publishing (Dubrovnik, Slavonia, Dalmatia)
* Periods: Catholic Reformation, Protestant publishing, the Napoleonic times
* The Ottoman as the Other
* Publishing and the marketplace
* Print as social action
* Censorship (Habsburg, Venetian, Communist, etc.)
* Official publications and the privileged regimes of truth
* Popular and elite print
* History of bureaucracy and printed forms
* The printed book and its digital representation

Examples of the contributions we seek will focus on diversity of culture
and hybridity of traditions (oral / literate), traditionalism /
progressivism, regional and linguistic multiplicity, localization
(East/West; periphery/center, diaspora), colonialism -  perspectives that
cannot be contained within a single determinant of language or unity of
space. We also seek contributions that will capture a diversity of genres
and popular print culture. For example, we are interested in studies of
ephemera, textbooks, prayer-books, print genres that have been shaped in
and re-shaped the oral tradition, almanacs, music publishing, the
circulation of images, counter-system publishing. The national literary
tradition organized around a national vernacular prevents seeing the
networks of print resulting from a multi-lingual tradition produced in a
multi-lingual arena of the Habsburg Empire with multi-lingual readership,
niche publication, etc. Works in German, Italian, and Latin, together with
the Croatian vernacular are representative of the print culture in Croatia
as are its links to the Venetian, Habsburg and Ottoman context of
production, distribution, and use of print. Through the notion of
borderlands as framework for examining print culture in Croatia, we want
to demonstrate how national tradition can become an "ideal type" for an
emerging comparative and cross-cultural approach to book history.


Papers in Croatian or English are invited for Volume 48 (3/4 2005) of the
journal.

Submission deadline: March 15, 2005
Address for submission and inquiries:

Marija Dalbello, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Library and Information Science
School of Communication, Information and Library Studies
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
4 Huntington Street, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08901-1071
tel. +732-932-7500 / 8215
fax: +732-932-6244
dalbello at scils.rutgers.edu
http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~dalbello


Manuscript guidelines:
Please refer to the journal website at
http://www.hkdrustvo.hr/hr/izdanja/kategorija/vbh/.


Vjesnik bibliotekara Hrvatske is the official journal of the Croatian
Library Association. It is refereed and it is internationally indexed and
abstracted.
The journal is issued in hard and electronic copy.

---

Marija Dalbello
Assistant Professor
Department of Library and Information Science
School of Communication, Information and Library Studies
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
4 Huntington Street
New Brunswick, New Jersey 08901-1071
Voice: 732.932.7500 / 8215
Internet: dalbello at scils.rutgers.edu
http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~dalbello

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