Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women’s Poetry
In Fair Copy Jennifer Putzi studies the composition, publication, and circulation of American women's poetry in the antebellum United States.
Bonds of War: How Civil War Financial Agents Sold the World on the Union
How does one package and sell confidence in the stability of a nation riven by civil strife?
Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era
This illuminating book examines how the public funerals of major figures from the Civil War era shaped public memories of the war and allowed a diverse set of people to contribute to changing American national identities. These funerals featured lengthy processions that sometimes crossed multiple state lines, burial ceremonies open to the public, and other cultural productions of commemoration such as oration and song. As Sarah J.
Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic
Beginning in the late seventeenth century and concluding with the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, Almost Dead reveals how the thousands of captives who lived, bled, and resisted in the Black Urban Atlantic survived to form dynamic communities.Michael Lawrence Dickinson uses cities with close commercial ties to shed light on similarities, variations, and linkages between urban Atlantic slave communities in mainland America and the Caribbean.
American Fragments: The Political Aesthetic of Unfinished Forms in the Early Republic
In the years between the independence of the colonies from Britain and the start of the Jacksonian age, American readers consumed an enormous number of literary texts called "fragments." American Fragments recovers this archive of the romantic period to raise a set of pressing questions about the relationship between aesthetic and national realities: What kind of artistic creation was a fragment?, And how and why did deliberately unfinished writing emerge alongside a country that was itself still unfinished?
Staged Readings: Contesting Class in Popular American Theater and Literature, 1835-75
Staged Readings studies the social consequences of 19th-century America’s two most prevalent leisure forms: theater and popular literature. In the midst of watershed historical developments—including numerous waves of immigration, two financial Panics, increasing wealth disparities, and the Civil War—American theater and literature were developing at unprecedented rates. Playhouses became crowded with new spectators, best-selling novels flew off the shelves, and, all the while, distinct social classes began to emerge.
The Textual Effects of David Walker's "Appeal" Print-Based Activism Against Slavery, Racism, and Discrimination, 1829-1851
Historians and literary historians alike recognize David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829-1830) as one of the most politically radical and consequential antislavery texts ever published, yet the pamphlet's significant impact on North American nineteenth-century print-based activism has gone under-examined. 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.
Publishing Plates: Stereotyping and Electrotyping in Nineteenth-Century US Print Culture
Invented in the late eighteenth century, stereotyping—the creation of solid printing plates cast from movable type—fundamentally changed the way in which books were printed. Publishing Plates chronicles the technological and cultural shifts that resulted from the introduction of this technology in the United States. The commissioning of plates altered shop practices, distribution methods, and even the author-publisher relationship. Drawing on archival records, Jeffrey M.
The Strangers Book: The Human of African American Literature
The year 1845 saw the publication of two key texts in the African American literary tradition: Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, American Slave, Written by Himself and a collection of francophone poetry published in New Orleans by a group of free men of color and titled Les Cenelles: Choix des poésies indigènes.
Bringing Pictures Back: Illustration for Nineteenth-Century American Literature
It has long been assumed that early America lacked a vibrant visual culture, but the printed record indicates another reality, one that has often been ignored by historians of the book and others. In this presentation, Georgia Barnhill will share some of her research about the production and reception of illustrations for poetry and fiction. In particular Barnhill will explain the challenging issues that faced nineteenth-century publishers and some of those facing researchers today.