The match between contemporary book publishing and academia would appear at first glance to be the most natural of alliances. No other subgroup of the general population is as likely to deal with publishers in the capacity of author, contributor or reviewer, and no other profession would appear as predisposed to bibliophily as the humanities academic. In the twenty-first-century research-intensive university, publishing quantum is the indisputable currency of hiring, promotion and grant decision-making, with books enshrined as the highest accredited research output for humanities scholars. Yet, until recent years, publishing has constituted the academy's medium for research dissemination rather than its explicit subject.' Over the last fifteen years or so, publishing courses have begun to multiply internationally in the post-secondary education sector, appearing first in the guise of vocationally-oriented certificate and diploma courses in institutes of further education, and only more recently (and tentatively) infiltrating the postgraduate coursework and doctoral programmes of internationally recognised research universities.2 The research quantum imperatives of such institutions have combined with the pre-eminence of theory in the humanities over the last decades to exert pressure upon publishing studies. The field is currently experiencing a sense of urgency arising from both scholars and their institutions to reconfigure itself as a critical-rather than merely a descriptive or vocational-field.3 As so recent an entrant to academic environments on any terms, contemporary publishing studies may justifiably find this new demand that it generate a coherent theoretical paradigm and research methodology forthwith somewhat confronting.
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