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This article proposes Ullapoolism, a post-data, activist, autoethnographic epistemology for contemporary book culture studies. It begins by addressing the challenges of contemporaneity and multidisciplinarity in researching the creation, circulation and use of books. We identify a rigidity that limits existing theoretical frameworks for the study of book cultures, and a paucity in existing research modes—including those from literary sociology, the digital humanities and cultural analytics—that collect, count and model book cultures. Our alternative epistemology, Ullapoolism, draws on two modes of action developed by the Situationist International—détournements, mischievous re-inscriptions of existing cultural artefacts; and dérives, active drifts through space attuned to emotion—and addresses potential predicaments including recuperation and entanglement. The situated knowledge produced through this epistemology has practical applications. Fields are not neutral, and as mischief-making activists, we use creative critique and playful experimentalism to oppose structural inequity. Ullapoolism therefore offers a future program for both cultural analysis and scholarly activism.

This article establishes a quantitative and qualitative model of small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) publisher ‘Tiers’, in order to enable researchers and cultural policy makers to have a more granular understanding of the impact of publisher size. Through an aggregated set of case studies deriving from the UK, the article also develops an understanding of how to build a cultural support model for publishing based on publisher size, sustainability and company life cycle. What the Tiers model underpins in terms of cultural policy funding for publishers is a rigorous and developmental sense of a publishing ecosystem, offering a framework which is attendant to industry and broader contexts, and enables cultural policy funding to take into account publisher development, challenge and growth.

The Frankfurt Book Fair is the leading global industry venue for rights sales, facilitating business-to-buzzness deals and international networks. In this Element, we pursue an Ullapoolist approach to excavate beneath the production of bestsellers at the Fair. Our investigation involved three consecutive years of fieldwork (2017–2019) including interviews and autoethnographic, arts-informed interventions. The Element argues that buzz at the Fair exists in two states: as market-ready media reports and partial, lived experiences linked to mood. The physical structures and absences of the Fair enact its power relations and direct the flow of books and buzz. Further, the Fair is not only a site for commercial exchange but a carnival of sorts, marked by disruptive historical events and problematic socio-political dynamics. Key themes emerging from the Element are the presence of excess, the pseudo(neo)liberal self-satisfaction of book culture, and the interplay of optimism and pessimism in contemporary publishing.

A partir de l’appui d’une recherche menee en maternite aupres de femmes venant d’accoucher, l’auteure s’interroge sur le recent debat autour de la violence obstetricale. Portee par une formation d’orientation analytique, elle met en relief la mise en tension entre subjectivite et objectivite qui entoure ce debat en France, et invite a en reperer les enjeux multiples, complexes, et inter-disciplinaires, au-dela de cette mise en tension.Partant d’un ancrage dans la clinique, l’auteure rend compte des perspectives de travail que ce sujet ouvre pour les psychologues cliniciens ainsi que pour les professionnels de la naissance, a travers notamment la dimension de contenance. Ce faisant, elle ouvre alors la reflexion autour des impacts eventuels de l’accouchement pour la femme, pour son conjoint, pour l’enfant, ainsi que pour les soignants.

In order to explore monograph peer review in the arts and humanities, this article introduces and discusses an applied example, examining the route to publication of Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg Sedo’s Reading Beyond the Book: The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture (2013). The book’s co-authors supplemented the traditional ‘blind’ peer-review system with a range of practices including the informal, DIY review of colleagues and ‘clever friends’, as well as using the feedback derived from grant applications, journal articles and book chapters. The article ‘explodes’ the book into a series of documents and non-linear processes to demonstrate the significance of the various forms of feedback to the development of Fuller and Rehberg Sedo’s monograph. The analysis reveals substantial differences between book and article peer-review processes, including an emphasis on marketing in review forms and the pressures to publish, which the co-authors navigated through the introduction of ‘clever friends’ to the review processes. These findings, drawing on science and technology studies, demonstrate how such a research methodology can identify how knowledge is constructed in the arts and humanities and potential implications for the valuation of research processes and collaborations.

Au moment ou le Comite consultatif national d’ethique s’est prononce en juin 2017 en faveur de l’ouverture des dons des spermatozoides aux femmes en couple et aux femmes seules, les principes de gratuite et d’anonymat qui ont prevalu dans les banques de gametes sont debattus. L’assistance a la procreation pour des raisons d’infertilite, jusque-la seule autorisee, repondrait des lors a des raisons societales. L’article aborde, dans ce contexte, la facon dont les donneurs et les couples en attente de don sont accueillis actuellement au cecos de Cochin. L’impossibilite d’enfanter « naturellement » est difficile a vivre. En cas de don heterologue (avec donneur), les couples doivent surmonter la rupture partielle du lien biologique avec l’enfant, ce qui bouleverse les reperes des filiations imaginaire et symbolique. Les couples sont accompagnes dans les etapes de ces procreations electives afin de pouvoir apprehender les enjeux psychiques de ces nouveaux scenarios de la parentalite.

La prise en consideration de la mort perinatale a progresse dans les equipes obstetricales du fait d’une meilleure reconnaissance sociale et juridique de son occurrence mais aussi de ses repercussions psychologiques sous l’influence des psychiatres et des psychologues ; elle ne reste pas moins une blessure narcissique. Le ressenti subjectif des parents qui y sont confrontes necessite un travail psychique douloureux en raison du choc traumatique de l’annonce de la mort du bebe et plus a distance, en raison des consequences de la perte narcissique et d’une certaine forme de deuil. Parfois, l’affliction perdure sous la forme de symptomes obsedants, hypocondriaques voire hallucinatoires au-dela de l’episode actuel, y compris lors d’une grossesse suivante. Cette clinique de la mort perinatale est d’autant plus troublante qu’elle donne forme aux dangers reels pesant sur la naissance, mais aussi aux menaces imaginaires apparaissant dans les vœux de mort et les fan­tasmes d’enfant mort en lien avec le narcissisme infantile, comme le revele la clinique psychanalytique. Par ailleurs, l’experience de l’enfant ne sans vie, difficilement figurable pour les parents, est exposee subjectivement dans des œuvres litteraires a travers une ecriture quasi-therapeutique, permettant de prendre une certaine distance par rapport a la violence traumatique et a la depression. L’ecriture confere une forme expressive aux sentiments d’absence, de vide et de nostalgie, lies a ce qu’on nomme parfois un non-evenement (Thomas Hardy, Margaret Mitchell, Henry James et Toby Litt).

From 1970 onward, then, via mergers and acquisitions, the ownership of publishing companies became increasingly globalized. This chapter addresses evidence for the plurality of output in a globalized marketplace, the impact of this for the consumer, and the growing opportunities seemingly afforded by fan fiction and self‐publishing platforms. Consumption has become much easier to quantify in the post‐1970 period in some countries with the introduction of electronic point of sale systems. General book consumer surveys exist in various publishing markets, but their coverage is patchy, and they often use non‐comparable statistical bases. The variable levels of data provided via the International Publishers Association website clearly demonstrate this knowledge gap and confirm Robert Darnton's statement about the difficulties inherent in the study of reading. Moreover, given the variable ways in which readers acquire books, patterns of consumption do not strictly mirror patterns of reading.

This chapter examines the gatekeeping orientation, evaluative processes, and decision-making role of the publisher’s commissioning editor through a conceptual framework of sensing the novel, seeing the book, and selling the goods. This framework incorporates the affective, and often bodily processes, of reading novels (‘sensing’), alongside the matching of taste to communicative processes and an envisioning of the material book-as-product (‘seeing’), culminating in the commercial impetus of books-as-goods (‘selling’). Through semi-structured interviews, the chapter examines the sensory and passional ways in editors recount their experiences of commissioning as a lived, felt experience but also as a professional discourse and an economic practice. As such, the chapter argues that sensing-seeing-selling is a networked praxis in which aesthetic objects, individual professionalized readers, emotional labor, publishing processes, company formations, material embodiments, and market environments come together.

Book awards are a pervasive aspect of contemporary book culture, attracting both substantial media and scholarly attention. They confer prestige, create marketing opportunities, push sales, and contribute to the early stages of canon formation. Yet, beyond occasional media splashes when judges break ranks and disagree, there is little insight into the administrative and decision-making processes inside book awards. This article draws on the autoethnographic experiences of two academic researchers, who were simultaneously participants (as administrator and judge) for the Saltire Society Literary Awards. In so doing, the article gives insight into particular moments within the administration and judging of the awards, such as changes instigated by research findings and debates surrounding gender imbalance in Scottish literary award culture. It also examines some of the challenges of operating as embedded researchers. The article analyses what autoethnographic methods can bring to an understanding of the Saltire Society’s Literary Awards and other cultural awards, and the implications of embedded research and collaborative autoethnography for 21st century book culture scholarship more widely. It reflects upon modes of embedded research by making evident the challenges and dilemmas of researching from the ‘inside’. The ethical framework for such research is far from simple, but in exploring particular moments with perspectives from both inside and outside the judging processes, and in interrogating the practices of literary consecration, the article casts light upon this particular ‘judging club’ and its practices, and illuminates ways in which researchers might consider, orientate, and carry out further research into processes of cultural consecration.

The book festival provides an intriguing instance of the overlapping cultural, social and economic dimensions of contemporary literary culture. This article proposes the application of a new conceptual framework, that of game-inspired thinking, to the study of book festivals. Game-inspired thinking uses games as metaphors that concentrate and exaggerate aspects of cultural phenomena in order to produce new knowledge about their operations. It is also an arts-informed methodology that offers a mid-level perspective between empirical case studies and abstract models. As a method, our Bookfestivalopoly and other games focus attention on the material, social and ideological dimensions of book festivals. In particular, they confirm the presence of neoliberal pressures and neocolonial inequalities in the “world republic of letters.” Our research thus makes a contribution to knowledge about the role of festivals within contemporary literary culture, and provides a model for researchers of cultural phenomena who may want to adopt game-inspired, arts-informed thinking as an alternative to traditional disciplinary methods., Le festival du livre constitue un exemple intéressant quant à la manière dont les dimensions culturelle, sociale et économique se chevauchent dans la culture littéraire contemporaine. Le présent article propose l’application d’un nouveau cadre conceptuel à l’étude des festivals du livre, celui de la réflexion inspirée par le jeu. Dans cette dernière, les jeux agissent comme des métaphores qui concentrent et exagèrent certains aspects de phénomènes culturels afin de produire un savoir inédit sur leurs mécanismes. Il s’agit aussi d’une méthodologie nourrie par les arts et qui offre une perspective à mi-chemin entre études de cas empiriques et modèles abstraits. Ainsi, notre « Bookfestivalopoly » (littéralement : Festivaldulivropoly) et les autres jeux dont nous nous inspirons ramènent l’attention sur les dimensions matérielle, sociale et idéologique des festivals du livre. Plus particulièrement, ils confirment la présence de pressions néolibérales et d’iniquités néocoloniales à l'oeuvre dans « la république mondiale des lettres ». Nous souhaitons, par nos travaux, contribuer à la connaissance du rôle des festivals au sein de la culture littéraire contemporaine et soumettre un nouveau modèle aux chercheurs qui s'intéressent aux phénomènes culturels et aimeraient adopter une approche inspirée par le jeu et les arts plutôt que les approches disciplinaires habituelles.

Au moment ou les dysharmonies de l’enfant sont integrees aux troubles du spectre autistique, il convient de questionner la place a leur accorder en psychopathologie. Ces enfants initialement fragiles, s’ils beneficient d’une prise en charge tres precoce, peuvent rattraper rapidement des difficultes de depart massives. Ceci souligne l’interet d’un reperage precoce de ces pathologies alliant les connaissances du developpement, du fonctionnement psychique et des theories intersubjectives.

This article draws on a dataset of structured research interviews with publishers, authors, and others involved in the book industries in Scotland and Slovenia. It analyses a variety of differences in how publishing businesses are conducted in each country, explores the impact of language, export, and translation, and examines the inter-relationship between state and commercial companies. In its final part, it looks at the connections between book-related identity-forming processes, on the one hand, and the market forces that shape both countries’ book markets on the other. Comparing the efficiency of the Scottish and Slovene book industries, the article finds that market size and the ability to streamline business by outsourcing seem to have more weight than the ability to handle a variety of sales channels and achieve a high level of labour effectiveness per title. This advantages Scottish publishing, giving it a more extrovert identity than Slovenia’s industry. Nonetheless, undercapitalization and the gravitational pull of London for bestselling Scottish authors means that both markets are mainly populated with small publishers. Financial and marketing power represent a barrier almost as sizeable as language, regardless of the ability to outsource and streamline business operations. The research contributing to this article was supported by two Caledonian Research Foundation/Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) European Visiting Research Fellowships in 2013.

Resume La maternite ravive certaines problematiques et notamment celle autour des conduites alimentaires. La grossesse est une periode de remaniements psychiques, de regression, ce qui se traduit par une hypersensibilite de la sphere orale. Ces preoccupations sont bien evidemment exacerbees chez les femmes ayant presente des Troubles des Conduites Alimentaires (TCA) avant leur grossesse ou pendant, mais elles sont aussi presentes chez les femmes enceintes tout-venant. Cet article propose tout d’abord une revue de la litterature relative aux changements alimentaires provoques par la grossesse, et a la facon dont les femmes les ressentent. Notre objectif est d’evaluer l’impact de la grossesse sur les comportements alimentaires et sur les preoccupations que les femmes ont au sujet de leur poids, voire, de leur image corporelle. Pour cela, nous avons fait passer a 285 femmes enceintes acceptant la recherche, une version adaptee du questionnaire SCOFF compose de 5 items. Ce questionnaire qui, au depart, est un outil de depistage des TCA, nous a permis d’avoir une vision globale des pratiques alimentaires des femmes enceintes. Les principaux resultats ont mis en evidence la preoccupation majeure des femmes enceintes pour leur alimentation. La grossesse est a l’origine d’un sentiment de perte de controle des quantites ingerees, et meme, de poids. Par contre, peu de changements sont relatifs a la satisfaction corporelle entre avant et pendant la grossesse.

Background Parents with past and current eating disorders (ED) have been shown to report troubles nourishing their infants. This could increase the risk of infant feeding problems linked to maternal anxiety and depression. It is not clear how mothers’ eating difficulties before pregnancy and at the time of birth can affect infant’s feeding. We aimed to specify the impact of eating disorders on mothers’ adaptation and sensitivity to their offspring during feeding, by comparing a population of mothers with eating disorders and controls. Methods Twenty-eight women agreed to participate in interviews and filmed mother-baby interactions. Pregnant women consulting at an obstetric unit for care follow-up were screened and tested for symptoms of eating disorders with the EDE-Q Questionnaire (Eating Disorders Examination Questionnaire) and the EDE Interview (Eating Disorders Examination Interview). Infant functional troubles and mothers’ sensitivity were investigated through the Symptom Check List. Reciprocal adaptation during feeding with their new-borns was filmed and analysed with the Chatoor Infant Feeding Scale. Before pregnancy, two women suffered from anorexia, three suffered from bulimia, three had binge eating symptoms and two were diagnosed with EDNOS (Eating Disorders Not Otherwise Specified). Results Mothers suffering from ED tended to show more difficult interactive patterns in terms of dyadic reciprocity when feeding their babies compared with mothers with no symptoms of eating disorders. In the interviews, other than the behavioural data gathered, ED mothers expressed feeling more dissatisfaction and uneasiness during feeding. Conclusions Pregnancy seems to be an useful period for interviewing women on eating disorders, allowing for the design and implementation of prevention programmes based on mothers’ narratives and infant/mother observations and treatment.

International audience; The knowledge of popular beliefs and traditions about death, birth, masculinity, and femininity is explored through notions such as unconscious motives, Oedipus, incest prohibition, and generational differences. We will examine magic thinking in anthropological and psychoanalytic studies about maternity and birth. We will question whether trauma transmission and unresolved mourning are better understood through a psychoanalytic interpretation of magic thinking. Then we will point out how a stillbirth can lead a mother to experience anxiety and a state of psychic contamination in the following pregnancy, and how this leads to archaic psychological mechanisms in her subsequent child.; La connaissance des croyances et coutumes d’autres traditions concernant la mort, la naissance, le masculin et le féminin est éclairée par la considération des pulsions, de l’œdipe, de l’interdit de l’inceste ou des différences de générations. Nous examinerons la pensée magique dans certains travaux anthropologiques et psychanalytiques sur la maternité et la naissance d’un enfant. Ensuite, nous nous demanderons si la transmission des traumatismes, des phénomènes de répétition, des deuils non élaborés à des enfants est éclairée par l’interprétation psychanalytique des mécanismes de pensée magique. Enfin, nous montrerons comment la coïncidence de la mort et de la naissance chez une mère ayant connu une mort in utero peut la conduire à se trouver, lors de la naissance d’un enfant suivant, dans un état d’angoisse et de contagiosité psychique conduisant à des mécanismes de pensée archaïque chez son enfant.

The recognizable orange, white and black colour scheme catches the attention of patrons passing by the local library bulletin board for reading groups.1 The brochure’s headline, ‘PENGUIN READERS’ BOOK OF THE MONTH’, jumps out from the various pamphlets on display. The front text tells us that Penguin asked ‘hundreds of librarians nationwide’ (in the UK) to recommend contemporary novels that they believed would appeal to reading groups. Inside the brochure we find six Penguin titles for their 2005 ‘Book of the Month’ programme, ranging from Esther Freud’s The Sea House to The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler. The programme, according to Penguin, includes novels that ‘appeal to each member of the wide-ranging library reading groups that they will be running and supporting for the next six months’.2

International audience; An Essay on Gamete Donation.The question of lifting the anonymity of donors in medically assisted procreation procedures, involving artificial insemination with sperm donation or fertilisation of an oocyte donated by a third party, is at present the subject of heated debate in France. It is rooted in a train of thought underpinned by children trying to trace their paternal or maternal filiation and aims at making this easier, thereby promoting the child’s ‘right’ to gain knowledge of their own origins. Elective filiations such as these refuel the nature/nurture debate and the representations they go hand in hand with within the framework of reproductive medicine. Technical possibilities sometimes seem to far outdo the psychic capacity to cope with the consequences of infertility.; La possible levée de l’anonymat des donneurs dans le cadre des procréations médicalement assistées avec insémination des spermatozoïdes ou fécondation d’un ovocyte d’un tiers est débattue en France. Elle s’inscrit dans le courant initié par des recherches en paternité ou en maternité visant à la « traçabilité » des origines et du « droit » des enfants à connaître leurs origines. Ces filiations électives relancent le débat nature/culture et les représentations qui les accompagnent dans le domaine de la médecine de la reproduction. La technique semble parfois dépasser les possibilités psychiques de supporter les conséquences de l’infertilité.