This innovative collection of essays addresses important issues in the history of the book. The multidisciplinary essays consider different aspects of the production, circulation, and consumption of printed texts, analyzing such topics as market trends, modes of publication, and the use of pseudonyms by women writers. Contributors draw on speech act, reader response and gender theory in addition to historical, narratological, materialist, and bibliographical perspectives to study authors such as Dickens, the Brontës and George Eliot.