Prof. Paul Keen is one of twenty-two authors known as the Multigraph Collective who co-wrote the recently published Interacting with Print: Keywords for the Era of Media Saturation (Chicago University Press, 2017). In her recent review of the book in the Times Literary Supplement, Abigail Williams asks, “what would an academic book look like if it were a symphony, and its performers were also its conductors?” Here is her answer:
“Maybe something like Interacting with Print, a ‘multigraph’ study of 18th- and 19th-century print culture, with 22 editors and authors, all of whom are equally responsible for the content. The project is part pushback against the nature of the modern academy, with its persistent individualisation of scholarly output, the competition for grants, jobs and recognition, and the ranking of each candidate against others. There are clear intellectual gains in the multigraph model, which has the potential to marry the range of an edited collection with the unified vision of the monograph. It is an undeniable irony that the masking of the signs of authorship and ownership in Interacting with Print is staged within the discussion of a literary period in which those signs were taking on ever more significance. But a more powerful effect of the scheme is to reinforce the sociable and collective nature of writing and reading – a theme throughout the book, whether in the form of Suzanne Necker’s literary salon conversation, the shared cut and paste of early 19th-century British gift books or the marketing of German review periodicals.”
See the full review here.
Prof. Keen also has two new books forthcoming: a monograph with Palgrave MacMillan, The Humanities in a Utilitarian Age: Imagining What We Know, 1800-1850, and an edited collection (with Nancy Johnson) with Cambridge University Press, Mary Wollstonecraft in Context.