History of Publishing and Reading Seen from the Public and Institutional Spheres. Citizens' Participation in the Realm of Print Culture in Argentina. Research Project UBACYT 20020100200004 (01/K004)

Abstract

This project aims at studying various aspects of print culture present in the realm of books and reading in Argentina since the May Revolution until the mid twentieth century, especially from the point of view of the New History of Culture and its relationship with Library Science and Publishing. Documents that characteristically belong to the fields of Institutional History and Microhistory will be analyzed. These include: edicts and announcements, advertisements, newspapers and magazines, typographic fonts and impositions, the bibliographic materials that influenced the political thought of the time, printers’ records and their relationship with the world of publishing as found in publishers’ archives, among other “lesser printed matter” that Political History has ignored so far. A series of disciplines and their convergence are involved: literary studies, gender studies, library science studies, historic studies, and political science studies. The analysis and intercrossing of these domains, typical of the Humanities and the Social Sciences, will frame the object of study within a wider discipline: the History of Publishing and Reading in Argentina since 1810 until 1950. The methodology of apprehending the diverse cultural records, without leaving aside quantitative approaches, will allow a qualitative study of these facts, and, in some occasions, the application of the so-called “trace method”, in the reconstruction of textual representations and practices. In the same way, this research will focus on citizens’ participation, especially in the public and institutional spheres in urban settings, where the polysemantic structure of print culture is manifested more intensely. Within this context, the project aims at giving wider visibility to the extraordinary richness of print culture of the period being studied, and, on the other hand, at linking the world of publishing with the world of reading and its main actors: readers and their abilities to apprehend print discourse