Forms and Meanings - (New Cultural Studies) by Roger Chartier (Paperback)

About the Book

In Forms and Meanings, Chartier explores what effect changes in form will have on the way we come to know texts in the future, placing his projections within a larger historical perspective that spans from stone tablet to Guttenberg bible and beyond.

Book Synopsis

In this provocative work, Roger Chartier continues his extraordinarily influential consideration of the forms of production, dissemination, and interpretation of discourse in Early Modern Europe. Chartier here examines the relationship between patronage and the market, and explores how the form in which a text is transmitted not only constrains the production of meaning but defines and constructs its audience.

Review Quotes

"Drawing on a wide variety of evidence, including inventories of the costumes, program notes, and contemporary correspondence, Chartier provides a wonderfully rich account of what the performances meant."-- "Robert Darnton, New York Review of Books"

About the Author

Roger Chartier is Directeur d'Etudes at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, Professor in the College de France, and Annenberg Visiting Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of numerous books, including Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.