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Distinctions that Matter: Popular Literature and Material CultureBelphegor(abstract deadline: March 1, 2012)Belphégor: Popular Literature and Media Culturecontact email: anthony.enns@dal.caEssays  are invited for a special issue of Belphégor that seeks to explore the  relationship between distinctions of taste and textual production by  examining how the materiality of literary texts influences and perhaps  even determines their cultural status. In the nineteenth century, for  example, printing and binding became cheaper, faster, and more easily  accessible than ever before, which resulted in an explosion of print  material. As printing costs decreased and print runs increased, the  price of books became cheaper and publishers were able to attract more  readers, which led to a greater demand for new content. The cultural  impact of this shift was twofold. On the one hand, this decrease in  printing costs lowered the cultural entrance level, which resulted in  the expansion of popular or trivial literature as well as a wide range  of new popular formats, such as dime novels, pulp magazines, comic  books, and paperbacks. On the other hand, publishers also attempted to  mimic the conventions of exclusiveness through printing and binding  techniques in order to preserve the highbrow status of literature as a  marker of class distinctions. This led to the rise of competing formats  that attempted to challenge the perceived lowbrow status of popular  literature, such as deluxe editions and graphic novels. As the divide  between highbrow and lowbrow taste widened, the materiality of the text  became the primary site where the cultural status of popular literature  was both constructed and contested. The same issues also inform cultural  debates concerning digital media, as cultural distinctions are now  being reconfigured through new forms of electronic display in the  post-print era.Contributions are invited on any of the following topics:-The impact of printing technologies on the production and distribution of literary texts.-The relationship between the material properties of literary texts and their cultural status.-The production and reception of popular literary formats, such as dime novels, pulp magazines, comic books, paperbacks, etc.-The relationship between forms of electronic display and the cultural  status of digital texts, such as blogs, e-books, e-readers, and cell  phone novels.Please submit abstracts of no more than 1,000 words by March 1, 2012.  If an abstract is accepted, a full draft of no more than 10,000 words  should be submitted by July 1, 2012. Papers may be submitted in English,  French, Italian, German, Spanish, or Portuguese. For more information,  or to submit an abstract, please contact our guest editors:Dr. Anthony Enns, Dalhousie University: anthony.enns@dal.caDr. Bernhard Metz, Freie Universität Berlin: bernhard.metz@fu-berlin.deBelphégor is an international refereed scholarly journal dedicated to  the study of popular literature and media culture. The journal welcomes  all types of theoretical analysis and encourages interdisciplinarity  and comparative studies. Our goal is to stimulate discussion, research,  and exchange between researchers of all stripes in the Anglo-Saxon,  French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Portuguese-speaking worlds. For  more information, please visit http://etc.dal.ca/belphegor/.