Starting from an analysis of practices of participation in contemporary print and other media, the volume opens up a historical perspective, probing the potential of the concept of participatory cultures for the exploration of past forms of collaboration between individual and collective actors (i.e. authors, editors, publishers, fans, critics etc.). In doing so, the volume sheds new light on the historically, culturally, and medially specific forms and functions as well as on the economic, political and institutional parameters that contributed to the emergence and transformation of what turn out to be precarious alliances.

Martin Butler is Professor of American Studies at Carl von Ossietzky University, Oldenburg. His main fields of research are (theories of) popular culture as well as figures, media, and agents of cultural mobility. Albrecht Hausmann is Professor of Medieval German Literature and Culture at Carl von Ossietzky University, Oldenburg (Germany). His main research interests are narratology and the history of mediality in manuscript and print cultures. Anton Kirchhofer is Professor of English Literature at Carl von Ossietzky University, Oldenburg (Germany). His research focus is on the field of literature, its media and its cultural settings since the 18th century and particularly on the relations between fictional and critical discourses.