On Accidental and Parasitic Language – Sri Lanka Guardian slguardian.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from slguardian.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Abhijit Gupta is one of the leading practitioners of book history in twenty-first century India. He looks back at the work done in the past twenty years and considers the challenges ahead in a conversation with Murali Ranganathan
When did you realise that you had evolved into a book historian from a professor of English literature? How did the evolution happen?
It happened the other way around. I started teaching in an English department in 1999 and prior to that I had completed a PhD during 1994-96 on the publishing histories of some women novelists in late 19th-century England. But when I started my doctoral research in 1994, I was not even aware that a discipline called book history existed. So you could say that this was a classic instance of speaking prose without knowing it.