"The present book in both its topic and its transnational makeup has come at a very particular moment. A few short years ago, globalism seemed to be both a known and an inexorable phenomenon. With the end of the Cold War, the opening of the Chinese economy, and the ascendancy of digital...

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...