The Part and the Whole in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art

The Part and the Whole in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art
Author: Matthew Pethers
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024-04-12
Genre:
ISBN: 9781684485079

This collection maps the significance of fragmentary forms in early American literature and culture from the mid-seventeenth to mid-nineteenth century. The Part and the Whole recovers the distinct aesthetics of the incomplete, retelling the story of American culture by reorienting our collective understanding toward texts and objects that have often been critically ignored.

The Part and the Whole in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art

The Part and the Whole in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art
Author: Matthew Pethers
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2024-04-12
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1684485096

The essays in this pathbreaking collection consider the significance of varied early American fragmentary genres and practices—from diaries and poetry, to almanacs and commonplace books, to sermons and lists, to Indigenous ruins and other material shards and fragments—often overlooked by critics in a scholarly privileging of the “whole.” Contributors from literary studies, book history, and visual culture discuss a host of canonical and non-canonical figures, from Edward Taylor and Washington Irving to Mary Rowlandson and Sarah Kemble Knight, offering insight into the many intellectual, ideological, and material variations of “form” that populated the early American cultural landscape. As these essays reveal, the casting of the fragmentary as aesthetically eccentric or incomplete was a way of reckoning with concerns about the related fragmentation of nation, society, and self. For a contemporary audience, they offer new ways to think about the inevitable gaps and absences in our cultural and historical archive.

Consuming Anxieties

Consuming Anxieties
Author: Dayne C. Riley
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 142
Release: 2024-06-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1684485339

Writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—a period of vast economic change—recognized that the global trade in alcohol and tobacco promised a brighter financial future for England, even as overindulgence at home posed serious moral pitfalls. This engaging and original study explores how literary satirists represented these consumables—and related anxieties about the changing nature of Britishness—in their work. Riley traces the satirical treatment of wine, beer, ale, gin, pipe tobacco, and snuff from the beginning of Charles II’s reign, through the boom in tobacco’s popularity, to the end of the Gin Craze in libertine poems and plays, anonymous verse, ballad operas, and the satire of canonical writers such as Gay, Pope, and Swift. Focusing on social concerns about class, race, and gender, Consuming Anxieties examines how satirists championed Britain’s economic strength on the world stage while critiquing the effects of consumable luxuries on the British body and consciousness.

The Oxford Handbook of Early American Literature

The Oxford Handbook of Early American Literature
Author: Kevin J. Hayes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 656
Release: 2008-02-06
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0199720150

The Oxford Handbook of Early American Literature is a major new reference work that provides the best single-volume source of original scholarship on early American literature. Comprised of twenty-seven chapters written by experts in their fields, this work presents an authoritative, in-depth, and up-to-date assessment of a crucial area within literary studies. Organized primarily in terms of genre, the chapters include original research on key concepts, as well as analysis of interesting texts from throughout colonial America. Separate chapters are devoted to literary genres of great importance at the time of their composition that have been neglected in recent decades, such as histories, promotion literature, and scientific writing. New interpretations are offered on the works of Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards and Dr. Alexander Hamilton while lesser known figures are also brought to light. Newly vital areas like print culture and natural history are given full treatment. As with other Oxford Handbooks, the contributors cover the field in a comprehensive yet accessible way that is suitable for those wishing to gain a good working knowledge of an area of study and where it's headed.

Early African American Print Culture

Early African American Print Culture
Author: Lara Langer Cohen
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2012-09-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0812206290

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw both the consolidation of American print culture and the establishment of an African American literary tradition, yet the two are too rarely considered in tandem. In this landmark volume, a stellar group of established and emerging scholars ranges over periods, locations, and media to explore African Americans' diverse contributions to early American print culture, both on the page and off. The book's chapters consider domestic novels and gallows narratives, Francophone poetry and engravings of Liberia, transatlantic lyrics and San Francisco newspapers. Together, they consider how close attention to the archive can expand the study of African American literature well beyond matters of authorship to include issues of editing, illustration, circulation, and reading—and how this expansion can enrich and transform the study of print culture more generally.

America Writes Its History, 1650-1850

America Writes Its History, 1650-1850
Author: Jude M. Pfister
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2014-06-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0786479213

By turns irreverent, sympathetic and amusing, America Writes Its History, 1650-1850 adds to the public discourse on national identity as advanced through the written word. Highlighting the contributions of American writers who focused on history, the author shows that for nearly 200 years writers struggled to reflect, or influence, the public perception of America by Americans. This book is an introduction to the development of history as a written art form, and an academic discipline, during America's most crucial and impressionable period. America Writes Its History, 1650-1850 takes the reader on a historical tour of written histories--whether narrative history, novels, memoirs or plays--from the Jamestown Colony to the edge of the Civil War. What exactly did we, as Americans, think of ourselves? And more importantly; What did we want non-Americans to think of us? In other words, what was (and is) history, and who, if anyone, owns it?

American Literature and Immediacy

American Literature and Immediacy
Author: Heike Schaefer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2020-01-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108487386

Demonstrates that the quest for immediacy, or experiences of direct connection and presence, has propelled the development of American literature and media culture.

The American Revolution in New Jersey

The American Revolution in New Jersey
Author: James J. Gigantino
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2015-04-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813571936

Winner of the 2016 New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance Authors Award for the Edited Works Category Battles were fought in many colonies during the American Revolution, but New Jersey was home to more sustained and intense fighting over a longer period of time. The nine essays in The American Revolution in New Jersey, depict the many challenges New Jersey residents faced at the intersection of the front lines and the home front. Unlike other colonies, New Jersey had significant economic power in part because of its location between the major ports of New York and Philadelphia. New people and new ideas arriving in the colony fostered tensions between Loyalists and Patriots that were at the core of the Revolution. Enlightenment thinking shaped the minds of New Jersey’s settlers as they began to question the meaning of freedom in the colony. Yeoman farmers demanded ownership of the land they worked on and members of the growing Quaker denomination decried the evils of slavery and spearheaded the abolitionist movement in the state. When larger portions of New Jersey were occupied by British forces early in the war, the unity of the state was crippled, pitting neighbor against neighbor for seven years. The essays in this collection identify and explore the interconnections between the events on the battlefield and the daily lives of ordinary colonists during the Revolution. Using a wide historical lens, the contributors to The American Revolution in New Jersey capture the decades before and after the conflict as they interpret the causes of the war and the consequences of New Jersey’s reaction to the Revolution.

Against a Sharp White Background

Against a Sharp White Background
Author: Brigitte Fielder
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2019-05-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0299321509

The work of black writers, editors, publishers, and librarians is deeply embedded in the history of American print culture, from slave narratives to digital databases. While the printed word can seem democratizing, it remains that the infrastructures of print and digital culture can be as limiting as they are enabling. Contributors to this volume explore the relationship between expression and such frameworks, analyzing how different mediums, library catalogs, and search engines shape the production and reception of written and visual culture. Topics include antebellum literature, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement; “post-Black” art, the role of black librarians, and how present-day technologies aid or hinder the discoverability of work by African Americans. Against a Sharp White Background covers elements of production, circulation, and reception of African American writing across a range of genres and contexts. This collection challenges mainstream book history and print culture to understand that race and racialization are inseparable from the study of texts and their technologies.

Environmental Practice and Early American Literature

Environmental Practice and Early American Literature
Author: Michael Ziser
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2013-07-29
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1107005434

This text rethinks American literary history by focusing on the non-human, environmental agents that have shaped its development.