This book foregrounds the pressures that three transformative technologies in the long sixteenth century-the printing press, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass-placed on long-held literary practices, as well as on cultural and social structures. Sheila J. Nayar disinters the clash between...

Chapter 1: Introduction -- Chapter 2: Institutional Routines and the Victorian Publishing Industry -- Chapter 3: Authorship: Legitimation of a Literary Profession -- Chapter 4: Literary Agents: Middlemen of the Industry -- Chapter 5: Publishing Power Houses -- Chapter 6: The Macmillans: A...