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Published Words, Public Pages - SHARP Copenhagen: a Nordic conference of International Print Culture 10-12 September 2008 at The Danish Royal School of Library and Information Science, Copenhagen, Denmark Confirmed keynote speakers William St Clair, Hans Walter Gabler, Isabel Hofmeyr For further details please visit www.sdu.dk/ilkm/SHARPCopenhagen Published Words, Public Pages aims to gather together current research into print culture - book history, textual studies, sociology of literature, library studies, literature and media studies - undertaken in the Nordic and Baltic Sea regions and elsewhere. What is shared among and across disciplines when the historical and contemporary transmission of knowledge is considered in material terms? How can we understand the inter and intra-national circulation of knowledge, involving fiction, non-fiction and scientific writing, its material production, and distribution via libraries, commercial markets and non-commercial channels? How have the efforts of printers, editors, graphic designers, programmers, entrepreneurs, publishers, distributors and of course writers affected production, reception and significance? How are ideas of a public - a literary or general public, an author's, or the public sphere - linked to the histories of people who write, make or read books, and how are they coupled to ideas of gender, to regional or metropolitan identities, or to colonial and post-colonial experience? Emphasis is placed not only on inter and intra-national transmission but on self-reflection about methods and disciplinary boundaries. Is book history a discipline with methods of its own that can contribute to other disciplines? Or is it an inter or cross-disciplinary meeting point? Can rethinking these disciplinary questions lead us to an improved understanding of specific cultural, political, economic and geographic features that shape materials in print culture? Small languages, large markets - an apt description of the Nordic situation - addresses the export of small-language works to international markets. Conversely, small markets import large-language works (often outweighing domestic material). To reiterate, the conference has an international and interdisciplinary aim. Strategies deployed by international readerships, booktrades and scholars for responding to questions posed by the conference will help illuminate the situation of the Nordic and Baltic Sea regions through comparative example. Topics that the conference might wish to explore include · Translation and culture. Small languages, large markets. The export and import of texts. · Constructing publics, from the codex to the screen. Contributions might engage with relations between material transmission and publics, reader markets, law, censorship and copyright, and the construction of a public sphere, via 'public pages'. · Imagined communities - émigré communities, regional groups, national readerships within and beyond the national border, their books, and the libraries and institutions that have and continue to cater for them. · Economies of the scholarly edition - the historical, material, institutional, publishing and market conditions for today's critical editions. · Histories of reading - literacies, 'Leselust', religious reading, and the reading experience. · The Nordic model - the State and the book, in contemporary, historical and international perspectives. · Nordic antiquities - runes, sagas, Nordic signs, northern romanticism, its application, reception and transmission. · Transmitting the Nordic canon - Ibsen, Hamsun, Blixen, Brandes, Strindberg, Andersen in world markets. Anniversaries, reputations and business. Dr Wim Van Mierlo Reviews Editor, Variants Institute of English Studies University of London Senate House Malet Street London WC1E 7HU United Kingdom http://www.textualscholarship.org/ests/index.html http://www.rodopi.nl/senj.asp?SerieId=VARIANTS