Il n'y a pas de hors-texte

Take a look at the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Criticism entry on "book history".

See also the 2006 PMLA Special Issue on "The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature" edited by Leah Price and Seth Lerer. Especially important for us - given the fact that we have embarked on a bibliographic project focused on a particular literary genre - is the Seth Lerer asks in the conclusion to this issue: "What is the relation between the book as artifact and the aesthetics of the literary imagination?" (230).

In the PMLA special issue also take a look at Peter McDonald's essay "Ideas of the Book and Histories of Literature: After Theory?," especially ot pages 222-223, where he offers a re-translation of Derrida's famous statement "Il n'y a pas de hors-texte" (usually translated as "there is no outside the text," this phrase from "Of Grammatology" became a shorthand for deconstruction's attitude towards matters of literariness and textuality). McDonald's reading points out the pun on hors-texte(in McDonald's words, "a technical bookmaking term roughly translated as "plate") and hors texte("outside of the text), and uses this reading to draw some important connections between theory and the history of the book.