ABSTRACT
Rose writes as an historian and his definition was in fact supplied for the discipline called ‘book history’. The two broad directions from which most students of print culture approach the discipline are literary studies and media, communication and cultural studies. Supersessionist views of media formats such as those propounded by Marshall McLuhan, a founding figure of media studies, created an impression of print as an eclipsed medium, an antiquated curtain-raiser for the headline act of broadcasting and digital media. Pre-eminently, print culture studies is concerned with rescuing the book medium from invisibility on the grounds of its very familiarity. In keeping with its wide-angle view of book culture, the discipline is just as interested in the commercial specifics of how the contemporary book industry actually functions on a day-to-day basis. The disciplines from which these theoretical frameworks, medium theory; book history; political economy; and cultural policy, derive are, respectively, media studies, cultural history, economics and politics.
