Initial comments

Abstract

This new issue of the History of Books and Publishing section includes three papers that, from literary theory and criticism, sociology and history of education studies, present different approaches to think about the links between printed culture, the intellectual world and politics. From the study of archives to the intellectual biography of an editor, passing through the reconstruction of the field of journalism and its link with the publication of books, these works constitute relevant contributions to the knowledge of political publications.
The article by Mariano Sverdloff that opens the section is entitled "Literatures and right-wingers: historicizing concepts, expanding the archives". Sverdloff wonders about the possibility of categorizing "right-wing literatures" from a non-reified and non-essentialist position. The work on a corpus that includes what is considered high literature as well as productions that are not consecrated or not even considered as part of "literature" implies an approach and a reflection on the archival work and the materiality it implies. By attending to the works and also to their contexts of production and of reading and reception, taking into account the mediations of this process, Sverdloff problematizes the category of right-wing literature and proposes a novel interdisciplinary approach.
From a sociological approach inspired by the analytical perspective of Pierre Bourdieu, Micaela Baldoni focuses on thinking about the trajectories of the "political book" of the progressive world published by commercial publishers in the context of the democratic recovery. Within the framework of her doctoral research on the field of Argentine journalism, taking into account its spaces of intervention, its processes of renewal and the links with the intellectual and political field, Baldoni reconstructs a key moment for the so-called "political book": the process of autonomization of the book with respect to party organizations and also the process in which the political book ceases to be hegemonized by agents of the intellectual field and becomes dominated by journalists. The editorial collections "Nueva Información" of Legasa, "Memoria y presente" of Contrapunto and "Presente" of Editora|12 that Baldoni reconstructs are representative of the passage from the essayistic political book to a journalistic one in which research and documentaries prevail, in line with the renewal of journalism and the great issues of public and media agenda.
Finally, Federico Brugaletta reconstructs the editorial trajectory of Julio Barreiro, editor of the pedagogue Paulo Freire and enabler of the international circulation of his writings. Editor of magazines and militant of the left-wing fraction of the Protestant world, Barreiro's intellectual and editorial trajectory allows us to observe how the possibility of a work and the construction of an intellectual authority is conditioned and enabled by the editorial process. By following the training itinerary, the confessional and academic networks in which he participated and the political situations that his publishing activity went through, Brugaletta shows the process of growth and exposure of Paulo Freire's work from the activity of his publisher in Tierra Nueva and his later alliance with Orfila Reynal to finally enter Siglo XXI's catalog.