Leah Price teaches English at Harvard. She is the author of The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel.
Stenography is dying out; so are stenographers. When I mention that I’m working on the history of shorthand, people tell me that their mother knew shorthand, or their grandmother, or their husband’s first wife. Google ‘stenography’ and you’ll find obituaries from small-town newspapers. Only bloggers now use the word, the new media’s name for what the old...
What’s the most frequent question writers get asked? ‘Do you use a pen or do you type?’ Readers read; writers write, right? Well no.
Where other studies have examined the history of the novel in relation to romance, to the rise of the middle class or to emergent forms of subjectivity – the discours du jour – Leah...
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