This site is a supplement to Peter D. McDonald’s book Artefacts of Writing: Ideas of the State and Communities of Letters from Matthew Arnold to Xu Bing (Oxford, 2017, see also via Oxford Scholarship Online). It is also an exercise in digital curation and an online forum about thinking interculturally. It is intended to be a permanent work in progress.
The site has three main parts. The section entitled Basic Principles on the sidebar sets out some of the key propositions derived from the book that form the starting point and guiding parameters of the forum. The section called Main Pages, which runs across the top of the site and on a sidebar, contains supplementary materials, including author interviews and webnotes cued directly to the book using lowercase Roman letters, as well as short pieces on other writers whose work has a bearing on the site’s concerns and personal testimonies focusing on the intercultural as a lived experience. Finally, the Posts contain further reflections on language, writing, translation and thinking interculturally.
YouTube video of Artefacts book launch with Xu Bing (March 2018). For a related lecture series, see The Secret Life of Books (2022).
©Peter D. McDonald. All content contributed by PMcD is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence. In broad terms, this means that you can copy, distribute, and display the content, provided you credit the author, acknowledge the source (providing a link if published online), do not use the content for commercial purposes and distribute any derivative work under the same Creative Commons licence. The author reserves the right to use elements of the site in future publications.
Please note that some of the materials are from copyright-protected sources. These are indicated on the site itself. Before copying, distributing or displaying any of these materials you may need to seek a licence from the copyright holder. Though every effort has been made to trace and contact copyright holders prior to publication this has not been possible in all cases. If notified, the author will correct any errors or omissions at the earliest opportunity.
Artefacts of Writing 