Abstract This paper is based on a lecture at Oxford University given in January 2026 at the invitation of the Oxford University Ukrainian Society. It offers some highlights in the history of Ukrainian literature, but does not claim comprehensive coverage of all historical periods. The article explores how Ukrainian literature has survived empire, censorship, and repression while preserving its own language, traditions, and internal logic. From medieval epics and baroque drama to modernism, the ‘executed renaissance’, émigré post-1945 literature, and contemporary writing shaped by Russia’s war against Ukraine, this is an overview of a Ukrainian literary tradition often overlooked or misrepresented.
Abstract This essay investigates the emergence of a recognizable visual genre in the covers of contemporary Italian publishing, arguing that the extraordinary popularity of a recent boom in Italian historical family sagas, novels rooted in specific regional geographies, has generated not merely a graphic trend but a new visual grammar. Starting from the breakthrough of Stefania Auci’s I leoni di Sicilia and the editorial line subsequently developed by Nord, the article explores how the success of this literary phenomenon has been accompanied by the consolidation of a shared aesthetic built around female portraits, soft chromatic palettes, historical paintings, and nostalgic atmosphere. What emerged first in relation to a highly successful narrative model gradually developed into a recognizable iconographic code, later extending beyond Nord into other publishing houses, including for example Einaudi, Bompiani, and Piemme, suggesting the formation of a trans-editorial visual language associated with this recent success in Italian historical family sagas. Drawing on paratext theory and publishing history, the essay proposes a shift from the cover as an expression of publisher identity to the cover as a marker of genre, capable of anticipating themes, emotional promises, and readers’ expectations before reading begins. More broadly, it argues that this emerging visual grammar contributes to constructing a collective imagination around historical fiction, revealing how publishers shape not only what readers choose to read, but also what they expect literature to look like.
Abstract The main objective of this article is to identify the management operations and business strategy that have contributed to the economic and financial sustainability of the bookshop Livraria Lello in Porto, as well as the importance of marketing and communication policy in the development of the shop’s business model. The work is based on a literature review as well as on consulting published articles on Livraria Lello. The bookshop’s economic and financial reports from 2010 to the present were also analysed. Lello can be analysed in two main periods: before and after 2015. Before 2015, Lello was a bookshop with structural problems and facing difficulty in surviving, like many other independent bookshops. However, since 2015, Lello has been able to take advantage of a new market context, including the large influx of tourists to the city of Porto, and has developed a sustainable business model. It has also been able to adopt management, marketing, and communication strategies and practices that are consistent with the business project and with market opportunities that have been identified, including during the pandemic period in 2020 and 2021.
Abstract The definitional boundaries of the book have grown increasingly unstable in an era of hybrid formats, platform publishing, and shifting media practices. Technical, institutional, and pragmatic approaches each capture aspects of the book’s status, yet none provides a framework that highlights the book’s enduring cultural authority. This article advances a causal-ontological model grounded in Aristotle’s four causes (material, formal, efficient, and final). It is argued that the first three causes are often implicitly acknowledged in publishing studies, whereas the final cause, understood as the book’s purposive orientation, has remained largely overlooked in debates on the ontology of the book. It is argued that this dimension, though not metaphysically essentialist, illuminates the book’s epistemic affordances, cultural resilience, and symbolic persistence. By distinguishing between ancillary and ultimate ends, the causal model accounts for the book’s dual status as commodity and cultural instrument. In doing so, it clarifies persistent taxonomic challenges and demonstrates how philosophical analysis can enrich the theory of publishing.
