Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer

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.

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.

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A collection of four studies (three of which were given as the 1994 U. of Pennsylvania Rosenbach Lectures), each addressing how the forms that transmit text to readers or hearers constrain the production of meaning. Paper edition (unseen), $12.95. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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.