Institutional Forme

This chapter explores prospects for a reenergized history of the book amid the recent turn to a capacious formalism in literary studies that encompasses the sociopolitical reverberations of “form” in the traditional, aesthetic sense. The chapter argues that a key opening for book historians is the new formalists’ emphasis on the organizing power of institutions, something that book history implicitly engages in the course of its work but that literary criticism too often ignores or treats with hostility. Rereading D. F. McKenzie’s paradigm-setting proposals for a research program in the history of the book and using as a case-study that most literary of institutions, the library, I advocate a turn away from the field’s particularist mantra, “forms effect meaning,” toward McKenzie’s forgotten parallel claim that a sociology of texts “alerts us to the roles of institutions, and their own complex structures, in affecting the forms of social discourse, past and present.”