Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age

Twenty-first-century culture is obsessed with books. In a time when many voices have joined to predict the death of print, books continue to resurface in new and unexpected ways. From the proliferation of “shelfies” to Jane Austen–themed leggings and from decorative pillows printed with beloved book covers to bookwork sculptures exhibited in prestigious collections, books are everywhere and are not just for reading. Writers have caught up with this trend: many contemporary novels depict books as central characters or fetishize paper and print thematically and formally.

Prophets, Publicists, and Parasites: Antebellum Print Culture and the Rise of the Critic

Print culture expanded significantly in the nineteenth century due to new print technologies and more efficient distribution methods, providing literary critics, who were alternately celebrated and reviled, with an ever-increasing number of venues to publish their work. Adam Gordon embraces the multiplicity of critique in the period from 1830 to 1860 by exploring the critical forms that emerged.

Letters from Filadelfia: Early Latino Literature and the Trans-American Elite

For many Spanish Americans in the early nineteenth century, Philadelphia was Filadelfia, a symbol of republican government for the Americas and the most important Spanish-language print center in the early United States. In Letters from Filadelfia, Rodrigo Lazo opens a window into Spanish-language writing produced by Spanish American exiles, travelers, and immigrants who settled and passed through Philadelphia during this vibrant era, when the city’s printing presses offered a vehicle for the voices advocating independence in the shadow of Spanish colonialism.

Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America

In Relative Races, Brigitte Fielder presents an alternative theory of how race is ascribed. Contrary to notions of genealogies by which race is transmitted from parents to children, the examples Fielder discusses from nineteenth-century literature, history, and popular culture show how race can follow other directions: Desdemona becomes less than fully white when she is smudged with Othello's blackface, a white woman becomes Native American when she is adopted by a Seneca family, and a mixed-race baby casts doubt on the whiteness of his mother.

Radium of the Word: A Poetics of Materiality

With fresh insight and contemporary relevance, Radium of the Word argues that a study of the form of language yields meanings otherwise inaccessible through ordinary reading strategies. Attending to the forms of words rather than to their denotations, Craig Dworkin traces hidden networks across the surface of texts, examining how typography, and even individual letters and marks of punctuation, can reveal patterns that are significant without being symbolic—fully meaningful without communicating any preordained message.

Writing Across the Color Line: U.S. Print Culture and the Rise of Ethnic Literature, 1877-1920

Writing Across the Color Line examines interactions between U.S. writers of color and the predominantly white publishing trade at the turn of the twentieth century. The book considers how a constellation of ethnic authors—Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Charles W. Chesnutt, Finley Peter Dunne, W.E.B. DuBois and Sui Sin Far— sought commercial publication as a means to influence a national audience.

From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture

Koritha Mitchell analyzes canonical texts by and about African American women to lay bare the hostility these women face as they invest in traditional domesticity. Instead of the respectability and safety granted white homemakers, black women endure pejorative labels, racist governmental policies, attacks on their citizenship, and aggression meant to keep them in "their place."

The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson

When Bernard Bailyn's book The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson was published in 1974, the Times Literary Supplement called it "a biography that is a work of art: exquisitely written, delicate in insight, and imbued with a wisdom about men and affairs that is the true hallmark of a great historian." The book subsequently won the National Book Award for History in 1975. Now, inaugurating the first annual Robert C.

The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America

The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America was published by Knopf in 1994, and won the Francis Parkman and Ray Allen Billington prizes in American history. Since then, it has become a model for new approaches to writing narrative history. In The Unredeemed Captive, Demos offers a striking retelling of the aftermath of the 1704 French and Native American raid on the Puritan settlement in Deerfield, Massachusetts.

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