The Multigraph Collective
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780226469140
- eISBN:
- 9780226469287
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226469287.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, History of Ideas
This book delivers a reworking of the history of print through a unique effort in authorial collaboration. The book itself is not a typical monograph—rather, it is a “multigraph,” the collective work ...
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This book delivers a reworking of the history of print through a unique effort in authorial collaboration. The book itself is not a typical monograph—rather, it is a “multigraph,” the collective work of twenty-two scholars who together have assembled an alphabetically arranged tour of key concepts for the study of print culture, from Anthologies and Binding to Publicity and Taste. Each entry builds on its term in order to resituate print and book history within a broader media ecology throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The central theme is interactivity, in three senses: people interacting with print; print interacting with the non-print media that it has long been thought, erroneously, to have displaced; and people interacting with each other through print. The resulting book introduces new energy to the field of print studies, leading to considerable new avenues of investigation.Less
This book delivers a reworking of the history of print through a unique effort in authorial collaboration. The book itself is not a typical monograph—rather, it is a “multigraph,” the collective work of twenty-two scholars who together have assembled an alphabetically arranged tour of key concepts for the study of print culture, from Anthologies and Binding to Publicity and Taste. Each entry builds on its term in order to resituate print and book history within a broader media ecology throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The central theme is interactivity, in three senses: people interacting with print; print interacting with the non-print media that it has long been thought, erroneously, to have displaced; and people interacting with each other through print. The resulting book introduces new energy to the field of print studies, leading to considerable new avenues of investigation.
David Matthews
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781526129154
- eISBN:
- 9781526141996
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526129154.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature
David Matthews explores how Caxton’s awareness of linguistic change informed his editing methods. Caxton’s editing of Trevisa's translation of Higden’s Polychronicon, for example, shows a distinct ...
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David Matthews explores how Caxton’s awareness of linguistic change informed his editing methods. Caxton’s editing of Trevisa's translation of Higden’s Polychronicon, for example, shows a distinct diachronic consciousness and a desire to forge something new out of Trevisa's ‘old’ English. This stands in contrast to his more deferential treatment of Chaucer. Matthews thus differentiates between philology as a tool for understanding another language and as an editorial practice focused on rendering texts transparent.Less
David Matthews explores how Caxton’s awareness of linguistic change informed his editing methods. Caxton’s editing of Trevisa's translation of Higden’s Polychronicon, for example, shows a distinct diachronic consciousness and a desire to forge something new out of Trevisa's ‘old’ English. This stands in contrast to his more deferential treatment of Chaucer. Matthews thus differentiates between philology as a tool for understanding another language and as an editorial practice focused on rendering texts transparent.
Shannon Mattern
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781517902438
- eISBN:
- 9781452958767
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9781517902438.003.0002
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
“Steel and Ink: The Printed City,” traces how, for over half a millennium, the printed page has informed the way we’ve imagined, designed, constructed, inhabited, administered, and navigated our ...
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“Steel and Ink: The Printed City,” traces how, for over half a millennium, the printed page has informed the way we’ve imagined, designed, constructed, inhabited, administered, and navigated our cities. My exploration ranges from architectural treatises, maps, and pattern books to newspapers, contemporary niche periodicals, and new urban spaces for public reading.Less
“Steel and Ink: The Printed City,” traces how, for over half a millennium, the printed page has informed the way we’ve imagined, designed, constructed, inhabited, administered, and navigated our cities. My exploration ranges from architectural treatises, maps, and pattern books to newspapers, contemporary niche periodicals, and new urban spaces for public reading.
R. John Williams
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- August 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780190221928
- eISBN:
- 9780190221959
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190221928.003.0003
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Literature, Church History
A number of recent discussions of The Book of Mormon have attempted to push beyond the tired debates of apologists and critics by “bracketing” questions of the book’s ancient historicity. According ...
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A number of recent discussions of The Book of Mormon have attempted to push beyond the tired debates of apologists and critics by “bracketing” questions of the book’s ancient historicity. According to this approach, old efforts at affirming the text’s historicity only restrain and delimit our interpretive efforts by requiring in advance either dismissals of the volume’s sacred status (showing, for example, how many elements in the text have some correlative cultural referent in Joseph’s Smith’s New England religious environment; hence, fraud) or else faith-promoting reconstructions of its ancient historical origins (showing, by contrast, how many elements in the book can be explained only by transhistorical, angelic delivery; hence, Word of God). This essay argues that despite these pitfalls the narrative and structural realities of The Book of Mormon make all such attempts impossible. It is in this sense that the book provides a valuable case study in textual interpretation.Less
A number of recent discussions of The Book of Mormon have attempted to push beyond the tired debates of apologists and critics by “bracketing” questions of the book’s ancient historicity. According to this approach, old efforts at affirming the text’s historicity only restrain and delimit our interpretive efforts by requiring in advance either dismissals of the volume’s sacred status (showing, for example, how many elements in the text have some correlative cultural referent in Joseph’s Smith’s New England religious environment; hence, fraud) or else faith-promoting reconstructions of its ancient historical origins (showing, by contrast, how many elements in the book can be explained only by transhistorical, angelic delivery; hence, Word of God). This essay argues that despite these pitfalls the narrative and structural realities of The Book of Mormon make all such attempts impossible. It is in this sense that the book provides a valuable case study in textual interpretation.
Nancy Glazener
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199390137
- eISBN:
- 9780199390151
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199390137.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This chapter examines some of the effects of literature’s association with state power, as distinct from literature’s entanglement with nationalism. Through laws that create intellectual property, ...
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This chapter examines some of the effects of literature’s association with state power, as distinct from literature’s entanglement with nationalism. Through laws that create intellectual property, regulate commerce, and censor publications, state power affects literature in the United States (and together the United States and United Kingdom have affected Anglophone public culture’s treatment of these matters). The construction of literary authorship and changing formulations of aesthetic autonomy have been two of the most crucial features of literature’s platform impacted by state power, and both of them were shaped by the legal history of print. In considering how the scope of aesthetic autonomy came to be narrowed, it examines the career of Charles Brockden Brown in the 1790s.Less
This chapter examines some of the effects of literature’s association with state power, as distinct from literature’s entanglement with nationalism. Through laws that create intellectual property, regulate commerce, and censor publications, state power affects literature in the United States (and together the United States and United Kingdom have affected Anglophone public culture’s treatment of these matters). The construction of literary authorship and changing formulations of aesthetic autonomy have been two of the most crucial features of literature’s platform impacted by state power, and both of them were shaped by the legal history of print. In considering how the scope of aesthetic autonomy came to be narrowed, it examines the career of Charles Brockden Brown in the 1790s.
Jared Gardner
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252036705
- eISBN:
- 9780252093814
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252036705.003.0003
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This chapter recounts the struggles of publishers, printers, editors, and contributors to American magazines of the national period. It shows how the magazine occupies a liminal place at best in the ...
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This chapter recounts the struggles of publishers, printers, editors, and contributors to American magazines of the national period. It shows how the magazine occupies a liminal place at best in the history of print in the early republic. The book and the newspaper dominate far more space in the story of the print's rise, and rightly so, as the magazine seems dominated by random posturing, by armchair moralists with neoclassical pseudonyms offering their opinion on everything from fashion to dueling. It is no wonder that modern readers have favored two forms—novel and newspaper—whose genealogies are more immediately traceable into the twentieth century.Less
This chapter recounts the struggles of publishers, printers, editors, and contributors to American magazines of the national period. It shows how the magazine occupies a liminal place at best in the history of print in the early republic. The book and the newspaper dominate far more space in the story of the print's rise, and rightly so, as the magazine seems dominated by random posturing, by armchair moralists with neoclassical pseudonyms offering their opinion on everything from fashion to dueling. It is no wonder that modern readers have favored two forms—novel and newspaper—whose genealogies are more immediately traceable into the twentieth century.
Lise Jaillant
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474417242
- eISBN:
- 9781474434560
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474417242.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Cheap Modernism is the first sustained account of cheap series of reprints that transformed literary modernism from a little-read movement into a mainstream phenomenon – in Britain, Continental ...
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Cheap Modernism is the first sustained account of cheap series of reprints that transformed literary modernism from a little-read movement into a mainstream phenomenon – in Britain, Continental Europe and elsewhere. Mrs Dalloway or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are often presented as difficult books, originally published in small print runs for a handful of readers. But from the mid-1920s, these texts and others were available in cheap format across Europe. Uniform series of reprints such as the Travellers’ Library, the Phoenix Library, Tauchnitz and Albatross sold modernism to a wide audience – thus transforming a little-read “highbrow” movement into a popular phenomenon. The expansion of the readership for modernism was not only vertical (from “high” to “low”) but also spatial – since publishers’ series were distributed within and outside metropolitan centres in Britain, continental Europe and elsewhere. Many non-English native speakers discovered texts by Joyce, Woolf and others in the original language – a fact that has rarely been mentioned in histories of modernism. Drawing on extensive work in neglected archives, Cheap Modernism sheds new light on the complex relationship between modernism and the marketplace.Less
Cheap Modernism is the first sustained account of cheap series of reprints that transformed literary modernism from a little-read movement into a mainstream phenomenon – in Britain, Continental Europe and elsewhere. Mrs Dalloway or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are often presented as difficult books, originally published in small print runs for a handful of readers. But from the mid-1920s, these texts and others were available in cheap format across Europe. Uniform series of reprints such as the Travellers’ Library, the Phoenix Library, Tauchnitz and Albatross sold modernism to a wide audience – thus transforming a little-read “highbrow” movement into a popular phenomenon. The expansion of the readership for modernism was not only vertical (from “high” to “low”) but also spatial – since publishers’ series were distributed within and outside metropolitan centres in Britain, continental Europe and elsewhere. Many non-English native speakers discovered texts by Joyce, Woolf and others in the original language – a fact that has rarely been mentioned in histories of modernism. Drawing on extensive work in neglected archives, Cheap Modernism sheds new light on the complex relationship between modernism and the marketplace.
Kathryne Beebe
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- October 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780198717072
- eISBN:
- 9780191785641
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198717072.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Medieval History, History of Religion
Chapter 4 examines the available evidence for an actual readership of Fabri’s texts in the first century after their appearance, via an analysis of their manuscript transmission, marginalia, and ...
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Chapter 4 examines the available evidence for an actual readership of Fabri’s texts in the first century after their appearance, via an analysis of their manuscript transmission, marginalia, and printing history. In exploring the lines of transmission (where they exist), this chapter traces the movements of the extant manuscript copies for each of Fabri’s writings, with special attention paid to the copyists and their adaptations. The second section of this chapter briefly examines the marginalia evidence for how late-medieval readers may have approached Fabri’s texts. The final section of the chapter examines the printing history of Fabri’s Pilgerbuch in order to discover information about readers of Fabri’s pilgrimage narratives up until the late sixteenth century, when pilgrimage became mainly a literary and metaphorical trope.Less
Chapter 4 examines the available evidence for an actual readership of Fabri’s texts in the first century after their appearance, via an analysis of their manuscript transmission, marginalia, and printing history. In exploring the lines of transmission (where they exist), this chapter traces the movements of the extant manuscript copies for each of Fabri’s writings, with special attention paid to the copyists and their adaptations. The second section of this chapter briefly examines the marginalia evidence for how late-medieval readers may have approached Fabri’s texts. The final section of the chapter examines the printing history of Fabri’s Pilgerbuch in order to discover information about readers of Fabri’s pilgrimage narratives up until the late sixteenth century, when pilgrimage became mainly a literary and metaphorical trope.
Amiya P. Sen
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- August 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780199493838
- eISBN:
- 9780199097784
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780199493838.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, History of Religion, Indian History
This is a detailed study of the extant sources related to the life and teachings of Chaitanya, most of which were produced shortly after Chaitanya passed away. This survey includes three key aspects ...
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This is a detailed study of the extant sources related to the life and teachings of Chaitanya, most of which were produced shortly after Chaitanya passed away. This survey includes three key aspects connected with Chaitanya hagiographies available in manuscript form: the pressing literary and cultural quest for their discovery, the problem of their interpolation, and their printing history since the mid-19th century. This chapter studies five hagiographers in some detail, implying their intrinsic importance of their work to the reconstruction of the life and teachings of Chaitanya. This includes a critical treatment of the greatly controversial work Govindadaser Kadcha which has come to be seen in intensely polarised ways as possibly the earliest among hagiographies or else a modern forgery.Less
This is a detailed study of the extant sources related to the life and teachings of Chaitanya, most of which were produced shortly after Chaitanya passed away. This survey includes three key aspects connected with Chaitanya hagiographies available in manuscript form: the pressing literary and cultural quest for their discovery, the problem of their interpolation, and their printing history since the mid-19th century. This chapter studies five hagiographers in some detail, implying their intrinsic importance of their work to the reconstruction of the life and teachings of Chaitanya. This includes a critical treatment of the greatly controversial work Govindadaser Kadcha which has come to be seen in intensely polarised ways as possibly the earliest among hagiographies or else a modern forgery.
Lise Jaillant
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474417242
- eISBN:
- 9781474434560
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474417242.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The introduction summarises recent scholarship on (1) literary modernism in the marketplace; (2) book history and print culture studies, including the study of publishers’ series. The guiding thread ...
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The introduction summarises recent scholarship on (1) literary modernism in the marketplace; (2) book history and print culture studies, including the study of publishers’ series. The guiding thread of the argument developed in the book is introduced here: that European publishers’ series made modernist texts available to a mainstream readership – including many non-English native speakers in Continental Europe and elsewhere.Less
The introduction summarises recent scholarship on (1) literary modernism in the marketplace; (2) book history and print culture studies, including the study of publishers’ series. The guiding thread of the argument developed in the book is introduced here: that European publishers’ series made modernist texts available to a mainstream readership – including many non-English native speakers in Continental Europe and elsewhere.
Cynthia Wall
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780226467665
- eISBN:
- 9780226467979
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226467979.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
This book explores how changes in eighteenth-century language and its expression on the page also reshaped the British landscape. The term “approach” shifted from verb to noun, creating a new ...
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This book explores how changes in eighteenth-century language and its expression on the page also reshaped the British landscape. The term “approach” shifted from verb to noun, creating a new perceptual experience that visually explains a wider set of changing formal patterns and fundamental principles. The printed page underwent sweeping typographical modernizations: common nouns lost their capitals; proper nouns, their italics. The new uniformity paradoxically allowed more visibility to the "lesser parts" of speech, no longer visibly dominated by nouns. Grammarians began to pay more attention to things like prepositions, and narrative patterns in literature developed more prepositional play. The new linguistic approach inspired new narrative approaches, such as free indirect discourse. Examining the work of landscape theorists alongside travel narratives, topographical views, printers’ manuals, dictionaries, encyclopedias, grammars, and novels, this book reveals a new landscaping across disciplines--new approaches to perceiving and representing the world in word and image.Less
This book explores how changes in eighteenth-century language and its expression on the page also reshaped the British landscape. The term “approach” shifted from verb to noun, creating a new perceptual experience that visually explains a wider set of changing formal patterns and fundamental principles. The printed page underwent sweeping typographical modernizations: common nouns lost their capitals; proper nouns, their italics. The new uniformity paradoxically allowed more visibility to the "lesser parts" of speech, no longer visibly dominated by nouns. Grammarians began to pay more attention to things like prepositions, and narrative patterns in literature developed more prepositional play. The new linguistic approach inspired new narrative approaches, such as free indirect discourse. Examining the work of landscape theorists alongside travel narratives, topographical views, printers’ manuals, dictionaries, encyclopedias, grammars, and novels, this book reveals a new landscaping across disciplines--new approaches to perceiving and representing the world in word and image.
Patrick Kragelund
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198718291
- eISBN:
- 9780191787614
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718291.003.0017
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
The history of the Octavia’s reception begins in humanist Padua. Its impact on the writing of tragedy and modern praetextae was from the outset considerable. Challenging widespread hellenocentric ...
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The history of the Octavia’s reception begins in humanist Padua. Its impact on the writing of tragedy and modern praetextae was from the outset considerable. Challenging widespread hellenocentric views as to the basis for the rise of vernacular tragedy, it is argued that the models for this revival were more Roman than Greek, with Seneca and the Octavia as the far more familiar, but less prestigious, and therefore commonly unacknowledged, sources of inspiration. The handling of a set of typical ghost and dream scenes by the Italian pioneers are shown to affirm the strong awareness of Senecan drama, from Trissino, Giraldi, and Dolce to Tasso. Examples from France, Portugal, Flanders, and England, among them a drama about Mary Stuart and Busenello and Monteverdi’s Poppea, illustrate how the prestige of the Octavia only went into decline when the rise of normative Aristotelean poetics made its frequent changes of settings look ‘childish’.Less
The history of the Octavia’s reception begins in humanist Padua. Its impact on the writing of tragedy and modern praetextae was from the outset considerable. Challenging widespread hellenocentric views as to the basis for the rise of vernacular tragedy, it is argued that the models for this revival were more Roman than Greek, with Seneca and the Octavia as the far more familiar, but less prestigious, and therefore commonly unacknowledged, sources of inspiration. The handling of a set of typical ghost and dream scenes by the Italian pioneers are shown to affirm the strong awareness of Senecan drama, from Trissino, Giraldi, and Dolce to Tasso. Examples from France, Portugal, Flanders, and England, among them a drama about Mary Stuart and Busenello and Monteverdi’s Poppea, illustrate how the prestige of the Octavia only went into decline when the rise of normative Aristotelean poetics made its frequent changes of settings look ‘childish’.
Matthew C. Augustine
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781526100764
- eISBN:
- 9781526138651
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526100764.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Literary historians long considered Thomas Browne uninterested in the great events of his day. While more recent scholarship has revised this picture, it has tended to place the famous Dr Browne on ...
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Literary historians long considered Thomas Browne uninterested in the great events of his day. While more recent scholarship has revised this picture, it has tended to place the famous Dr Browne on the wrong side of a conflict between conservatives and radicals. This chapter begins by re-examining the relations between and among writing, politics, and class in revolutionary England, emphasising the fluidity of the ideological context in which Browne’s meditation was first written and published. The second part of the chapter traces the processual character of Browne’s text, that is, the multiplicity of material forms and circumstances in which his Religio Medici might have been encountered, and the various interlocutions that soon attached themselves to it and mediated its meanings. Finally, it seeks to reconstruct the religious subject and the spiritual politics constituted out of the text’s distinctive rhetorical form. Stepping out provisionally, with a sense of limitation, with a sense of style, this chapter argues, Religio Medici brilliantly addresses itself to the heresy of certainty under which Browne saw the Stuart church beginning to buckle.Less
Literary historians long considered Thomas Browne uninterested in the great events of his day. While more recent scholarship has revised this picture, it has tended to place the famous Dr Browne on the wrong side of a conflict between conservatives and radicals. This chapter begins by re-examining the relations between and among writing, politics, and class in revolutionary England, emphasising the fluidity of the ideological context in which Browne’s meditation was first written and published. The second part of the chapter traces the processual character of Browne’s text, that is, the multiplicity of material forms and circumstances in which his Religio Medici might have been encountered, and the various interlocutions that soon attached themselves to it and mediated its meanings. Finally, it seeks to reconstruct the religious subject and the spiritual politics constituted out of the text’s distinctive rhetorical form. Stepping out provisionally, with a sense of limitation, with a sense of style, this chapter argues, Religio Medici brilliantly addresses itself to the heresy of certainty under which Browne saw the Stuart church beginning to buckle.
Nancy Glazener
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199390137
- eISBN:
- 9780199390151
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199390137.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
Literature in the contemporary sense, comprising drama, fiction, poetry, and certain kinds of nonfiction prose, cohered during the nineteenth century and became the defining object of departments of ...
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Literature in the contemporary sense, comprising drama, fiction, poetry, and certain kinds of nonfiction prose, cohered during the nineteenth century and became the defining object of departments of modern languages and literatures in U.S. research universities. However, nonacademic literary culture in the nineteenth century hosted important forms of literary study and scholarship that have been missed by scholarship focusing on literature as an academic subject. Before the reorganization of knowledge around academic expertise in the late nineteenth century, academics and nonacademics interested in literary studies and scholarship partnered in ways that we might wish to reclaim or adapt. Literature was a transnational invention, but this book takes up the United States as a case study. It examines the public life of literature between the late eighteenth century and the early twentieth century, bringing together the development of literature’s intellectual infrastructure, literature’s operation in print culture, literature’s changing status in higher education, and the surprisingly rich and interesting history of public literary culture. To take the intellectual measure of public literary culture, this study focuses on nineteenth-century Shakespeare studies in the United States. Literary works such as Shakespeare’s plays were valued for both their contributions to public life and their transcendent aesthetic effects, and the tension between these investments established a generative matrix for literary studies that’s still in effect. Academic literary studies is also still grappling with the contradiction that literature was channeled into modern projects while also being entrusted with safeguarding antimodern values.Less
Literature in the contemporary sense, comprising drama, fiction, poetry, and certain kinds of nonfiction prose, cohered during the nineteenth century and became the defining object of departments of modern languages and literatures in U.S. research universities. However, nonacademic literary culture in the nineteenth century hosted important forms of literary study and scholarship that have been missed by scholarship focusing on literature as an academic subject. Before the reorganization of knowledge around academic expertise in the late nineteenth century, academics and nonacademics interested in literary studies and scholarship partnered in ways that we might wish to reclaim or adapt. Literature was a transnational invention, but this book takes up the United States as a case study. It examines the public life of literature between the late eighteenth century and the early twentieth century, bringing together the development of literature’s intellectual infrastructure, literature’s operation in print culture, literature’s changing status in higher education, and the surprisingly rich and interesting history of public literary culture. To take the intellectual measure of public literary culture, this study focuses on nineteenth-century Shakespeare studies in the United States. Literary works such as Shakespeare’s plays were valued for both their contributions to public life and their transcendent aesthetic effects, and the tension between these investments established a generative matrix for literary studies that’s still in effect. Academic literary studies is also still grappling with the contradiction that literature was channeled into modern projects while also being entrusted with safeguarding antimodern values.
Shannon Mattern
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781517902438
- eISBN:
- 9781452958767
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9781517902438.003.0003
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
“Of Mud, Media, and the Metropolis…,” examines the entwined histories of brick-making, mark-making, and city-building. I examine how urban surfaces have served as substrates for writing, from ancient ...
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“Of Mud, Media, and the Metropolis…,” examines the entwined histories of brick-making, mark-making, and city-building. I examine how urban surfaces have served as substrates for writing, from ancient epigraphy to contemporary graffiti; how written documents have been critical to our cities’ operations; and how our scripts’ formal properties are often reflected in urban form.Less
“Of Mud, Media, and the Metropolis…,” examines the entwined histories of brick-making, mark-making, and city-building. I examine how urban surfaces have served as substrates for writing, from ancient epigraphy to contemporary graffiti; how written documents have been critical to our cities’ operations; and how our scripts’ formal properties are often reflected in urban form.
Shannon Mattern
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781517902438
- eISBN:
- 9781452958767
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9781517902438.003.0004
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
“Speaking Stones: Voicing the City,” considers how the city itself functions as a sounding board, resonance chamber, and transmission medium for vocality: public address, interpersonal communication, ...
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“Speaking Stones: Voicing the City,” considers how the city itself functions as a sounding board, resonance chamber, and transmission medium for vocality: public address, interpersonal communication, and vocal expressions of affect. We consider ancient urban acoustics and the ongoing evolution of spatio-sonic politics related to such issues as the Muslim call to prayer and political protest.Less
“Speaking Stones: Voicing the City,” considers how the city itself functions as a sounding board, resonance chamber, and transmission medium for vocality: public address, interpersonal communication, and vocal expressions of affect. We consider ancient urban acoustics and the ongoing evolution of spatio-sonic politics related to such issues as the Muslim call to prayer and political protest.
Shannon Mattern
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781517902438
- eISBN:
- 9781452958767
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9781517902438.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
Offering powerful new ways of thinking about our cities, Shannon Mattern goes far beyond the historical concepts of origins, development, revolutions, and the accomplishments of an elite few. Her ...
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Offering powerful new ways of thinking about our cities, Shannon Mattern goes far beyond the historical concepts of origins, development, revolutions, and the accomplishments of an elite few. Her vivid prose leads readers through a historically and geographically broad range of stories and takes media archaeology to the city’s streets, revealing new ways to write our urban, media, and cultural histories.Less
Offering powerful new ways of thinking about our cities, Shannon Mattern goes far beyond the historical concepts of origins, development, revolutions, and the accomplishments of an elite few. Her vivid prose leads readers through a historically and geographically broad range of stories and takes media archaeology to the city’s streets, revealing new ways to write our urban, media, and cultural histories.
Shannon Mattern
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781517902438
- eISBN:
- 9781452958767
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9781517902438.003.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
“Waves and Wires: Cities of Electric Sound,” describes how, since the mid-19th century, our urban atmospheres have been charged with electric and electromagnetic telecommunications: telegraph and ...
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“Waves and Wires: Cities of Electric Sound,” describes how, since the mid-19th century, our urban atmospheres have been charged with electric and electromagnetic telecommunications: telegraph and telephone wires and radio waves. I explain how these technologies have shaped, and continue to shape, urban form, and make themselves heard in the urban environment.Less
“Waves and Wires: Cities of Electric Sound,” describes how, since the mid-19th century, our urban atmospheres have been charged with electric and electromagnetic telecommunications: telegraph and telephone wires and radio waves. I explain how these technologies have shaped, and continue to shape, urban form, and make themselves heard in the urban environment.
Shannon Mattern
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781517902438
- eISBN:
- 9781452958767
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9781517902438.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
“Coding Urban Pasts and Futures,” uses the recent reconstruction of Palmyra’s destroyed Arch of Triumph as a case study to explore many themes that resonate throughout the book: the entangling of ...
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“Coding Urban Pasts and Futures,” uses the recent reconstruction of Palmyra’s destroyed Arch of Triumph as a case study to explore many themes that resonate throughout the book: the entangling of materialities, temporalities, and geographies; the cultural politics of media archaeology and archaeology-proper; and the potential implications of these past-oriented fields of exploration for our urban-media futures.Less
“Coding Urban Pasts and Futures,” uses the recent reconstruction of Palmyra’s destroyed Arch of Triumph as a case study to explore many themes that resonate throughout the book: the entangling of materialities, temporalities, and geographies; the cultural politics of media archaeology and archaeology-proper; and the potential implications of these past-oriented fields of exploration for our urban-media futures.
Blaine Greteman
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198769774
- eISBN:
- 9780191822605
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769774.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Milton Studies, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
This chapter explores the eighteenth-century afterlife of Milton’s Mask, as it was renamed Comus and reshaped into an expression of Protestant poetics and Whiggish political opposition. Music by ...
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This chapter explores the eighteenth-century afterlife of Milton’s Mask, as it was renamed Comus and reshaped into an expression of Protestant poetics and Whiggish political opposition. Music by Thomas Arne, new text by John Dalton, and branding by the publisher Robert Dodsley made Comus speak to its moment and helped define its critical legacy in ways that are not widely understood. In its altered form, Comus became one of Milton’s most popular, if partly apocryphal, works. By studying the publication and performance networks responsible for the text’s transformation, we gain insight not only into the text’s eighteenth-century reception, but also the more recent scholarly tendency to misread Milton’s early Mask as an expression of his later reformist zeal.Less
This chapter explores the eighteenth-century afterlife of Milton’s Mask, as it was renamed Comus and reshaped into an expression of Protestant poetics and Whiggish political opposition. Music by Thomas Arne, new text by John Dalton, and branding by the publisher Robert Dodsley made Comus speak to its moment and helped define its critical legacy in ways that are not widely understood. In its altered form, Comus became one of Milton’s most popular, if partly apocryphal, works. By studying the publication and performance networks responsible for the text’s transformation, we gain insight not only into the text’s eighteenth-century reception, but also the more recent scholarly tendency to misread Milton’s early Mask as an expression of his later reformist zeal.
