Bøger i Material Texts serien

Reading Children offers a history of the relationship between children and books in Anglo-American modernity, exploring early children's literature, pedagogical practices, property lessons inherent in children's book ownership, and the emergence of childhood itself as a literary property.

Daniel O'Quinn investigates the complex interpersonal, political, and aesthetic relationships between Europeans and Ottomans in the long eighteenth century. Bookmarking his analysis with the conflict leading to the 1699 Treaty of Karlowitz on one end and the 1815 bid for Greek independence on the other, he follows the fortunes of notable British, Dutch, and French diplomats to the Sublime Porte of the Ottoman Empire as they lived and worked according to the capitulations surrendered to the Sultan.Closely reading a mixed archive of drawings, maps, letters, dispatches, memoirs, travel narratives, engraved books, paintings, poems, and architecture, O'Quinn demonstrates the extent to which the Ottoman state was not only the subject of historical curiosity in Europe but also a key foil against which Western theories of governance were articulated. Juxtaposing narrative accounts of diplomatic life in Constantinople, such as those contained in the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the English ambassador, with visual depictions such as those of the costumes of the Ottoman elite produced by the French-Flemish painter Jean Baptiste Vanmour, he traces the dissemination of European representations and interpretations of the Ottoman Empire throughout eighteenth-century material culture.In a series of eight interlocking chapters, O'Quinn presents sustained and detailed case studies of particular objects, personalities, and historical contexts, framing intercultural encounters between East and West through a set of key concerns: translation, mediation, sociability, and hospitality. Richly illustrated and provocatively argued, Engaging the Ottoman Empire demonstrates that study of the Ottoman world is vital to understanding European modernity.

In Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms, Jessica Brantley offers an innovative introduction to manuscript culture that uses the artifacts themselves to open some of the most vital theoretical questions in medieval literary studies. With nearly 200 illustrations, many of them in color, the book offers both a broad survey of the physical forms and cultural histories of manuscripts and a dozen case studies of particularly significant literary witnesses, including the Beowulf manuscript, the St. Albans Psalter, the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, and The Book of Margery Kempe. Practical discussions of parchment, scripts, decoration, illustration, and bindings mix with consideration of such conceptual categories as ownership, authorship, language, miscellaneity, geography, writing, editing, mediation, illustration, and performance-as well as of the status of the literary itself.Each case study includes an essay orienting the reader to particularly productive categories of analysis and a selected bibliography for further research. Because a high-quality digital surrogate exists for each of the selected manuscripts, fully and freely available online, readers can gain access to the artifacts in their entirety, enabling further individual exploration and facilitating the book's classroom use. Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms aims to inspire a broad group of readers with some of the excitement of literary manuscript studies in the twenty-first century. The interpretative frameworks surrounding each object will assist everyone in thinking through the implications of manuscript culture more generally, not only for the deeper study of the literature of the Middle Ages, but also for a better understanding of book cultures of any era, including our own.

In Won in Translation Roger Chartier considers the mobility of the early modern text and the plurality of circulating versions of the same work. The agent for both is translation, for through their lexical, aesthetic, and cultural decisions, translators always assign new meaning or new status to what they translate.

In The Textual Effects of David Walker's "Appeal" Marcy J. Dinius offers the first in-depth analysis of Walker's argumentatively and typographically radical pamphlet and its direct influence on five Black and Indigenous activist authors, Maria W. Stewart, William Apess, William Paul Quinn, Henry Highland Garnet, and Paola Brown.

In Bitstreams, Matthew G. Kirschenbaum distills twenty years of thinking about the intersection of digital media, textual studies, and literary archives to argue that bits-the ubiquitous ones and zeros of computing- always depend on the material world that surrounds them to form the bulwark for preserving the future of literary heritage.

Focusing on nineteenth-century poetry written by working-class and African American women, Jennifer Putzi demonstrates how an emphasis on relationships between and among people and texts shaped the poems that women wrote, the avenues they took to gain access to print, and the way their poems functioned within a variety of print cultures.

Featuring more than one hundred illustrations, 27 of them in color, The Art of Allusion amply exhibits the critical role book artists played in the formation of the English literary canon.

In Star Territory Gordon Fraser charts how the project of rationalizing the cosmos enabled the nineteenth-century expansion of U.S. territory and explores the alternative and resistant cosmologies of free and enslaved Blacks and indigenous peoples.

Between 1839 and the end of the nineteenth century, millions of nude photographs of the female form were produced in France. Drawing upon government records, legal decisions, newspaper accounts, and contemporary literature, Raisa Adah Rexer recounts the history of these images and elucidates their immense cultural and artistic reach.

In Book Traces, Andrew M. Stauffer reads nineteenth-century poetry through the clues and objects earlier readers left behind in their books and defends the value of the physical, circulating collections of nineteenth-century volumes in academic libraries.

Subscription Theater asks why turn-of-the-century British and Irish citizens spent so much time, money, and effort joining subscription lists. Matthew Franks argues that subscribers have been responsible for how we value audience and repertoire today, offering a new account of the relationship between ephemera, drama, and democracy.

Featuring more than 80 illustrations and easy access to related music files, this magisterial work argues that a ballad cannot be read as a fixed artifact, independent of its illustrations, tune, and movement across time and space.

Situated at the vital intersection of physiology, gastronomy, decorum, knowledge-production, and labor, recipes from the past allow us to understand the significant ways that kitchen work was an intellectual and creative enterprise.

Lavishly illustrated and impressively interdisciplinary, Inventing Exoticism narrates a vital chapter in the history of European exoticism and Europe's perception of its place in the world. It traces the production and consumption of early modern exotic imagery to elucidate processes of cultural mediation in an earlier age of empire.

Beginning with the beguiling queerness of the Renaissance letter Q, Jeffrey Masten's stylishly written and extensively illustrated Queer Philologies demonstrates the intimate relation between the history of sexuality and the history of the language.

This book explores actors' systems of intellectual property in early modern England. Focusing on Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, and other plays, James Marino demonstrates how Shakespeare's company asserted ownership of its plays through intense ongoing revision and through insistent attribution to Shakespeare.

The antebellum period has long been identified with the belated emergence of a truly national literature. Restoring a political dimension to accounts of the economic grounds of antebellum literature, this book presents the arguments and struggles that produced an American "culture of reprinting" and held it in place for two crucial decades.

Based on a survey of early printed books, Used Books describes what readers wrote in and around their books and what we can learn from these marks by using the tools of archaeologists as well as historians and literary critics.

"Taylor contributes new insights to material philology and makes a brilliant demonstration of its concerns."-Stephen Nichols, The Johns Hopkins University

Featuring more than 75 illustrations, Selling Antislavery offers a thorough case study of the role of reform movements in the rise of mass media and argues for abolition's central importance to the shaping of antebellum middle-class culture.

Exploring the poetic interplay between human ideas and the plant, animal, and mineral forms through which they are mediated, The Nature of the Page tells the story of handmade paper in Renaissance England and prompts readers to reconsider the role of the natural world in everything from old books to new smartphones.

In The Prosthetic Tongue, Katie Chenoweth explores the relationship between printing and vernacular language as it took shape in sixteenth-century France and charts the technological reinvention of French across a range of domains, from typography, orthography, and grammar to politics, pedagogy, and poetics.

Richard Stonley, the earliest known purchaser of Shakespeare's first publication, Venus and Adonis, has hitherto been the merest of footnotes in literary history. Through a combination of book history and biography, Shakespeare's First Reader tells a compelling story of how one early modern gentleman lived in and through his library.

In Paper Monsters, Samuel Fallon charts the striking rise in the 1590's of a new species of textual being: the serial, semifictional persona. He argues that their status as collective fictions, passed among writers, publishers, and readers, positioned personae as the animating figures of what we have come to call "print culture."

Colonial Revivals examines the rise of American antiquarianism and historical reprinting in antebellum America. Not merely vehicles for preserving the past, reprinted colonial books testified to the inveterate regional, racial, doctrinal, and political fault lines in the American historical landscape.

Highlighting meaningful overlap in the production and reception of books and games, Slantwise Moves identifies what they have in common as material texts and as critical models of the mundane pleasures and intimacies that defined agency and social belonging in the nineteenth century.

In Historical Style, Timothy Campbell argues that the eighteenth-century fashion press shaped British perception of time and history by producing new curiosity about the very recent past and a new self-consciousness about the means by which the past could be understood.

Sociable Knowledge reconstructs the collaborations of seventeenth-century naturalists who, dispersed across city and country, worked through writing, conversation, and print to convert fragmented knowledge of the hyper-local and curious into an understanding and representation of Britain as a unified historical and geographical space.

"A valuable introduction to the possibilities and perspectives opened up by the study of literary manuscripts and will leave readers curious to discover more about this important and growing field."-Romanic Review