For at least the past two decades, literary scholars have used insights from the emerging discipline of media studies to revisit and rethink canonical texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Print Technology in Scotland and America and The Camera and the Press are both solid efforts in this direction, as they draw on recent scholarship on media and mediation to explore a series of texts that they connect to nation building and empire. Ultimately, both works owe a greater debt to literary studies than media studies, but their insights may be of interest to scholars on either side of the fence.
Oddly, both books have titles that are somewhat misleading in terms of their actual subject matter. Print Technology in Scotland and America is indeed about Scotland and America, but it is not really about print technology in itself. True, McAuley’s central argument—that print was used in those countries...
