The World of Shakespeare and Company: An Introduction

What’s left to learn about Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach’s bookshop and lending library in interwar Paris? This introduction addresses this question by discussing the eight articles collected in the special cluster, “The World of Shakespeare and Company,” co-published by the Journal of Cultural Analytics and Modernism/modernity. All eight articles use data from the Shakespeare and Company Project to develop new accounts of modernism, the sociology of reading, and historical archives. Combining qualitative, quantitative, and computational methods, the articles open new paths for studying one of the most important institutions in literary history.