Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading, 1720–1810

Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading, 1720–1810
Author: Eve Tavor Bannet
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2011-07-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139497618

Eve Tavor Bannet explores some of the remarkable stories about the Atlantic world that shaped Britons' and Americans' perceptions of that world. These stories about women, servants, the poor and the dispossessed were frequently rewritten or reframed by editors and printers in America and Britain for changing audiences, times and circumstances. Bannet shows how they were read by examining what contemporaries said about them and did with them; in doing so, she reveals the creatively dynamic and unstable character of transatlantic print culture. Stories include the 'other' Robinson Crusoe and works by Penelope Aubin, Rowlandson, Chetwood, Tyler, Kimber, Richardson, Gronniosaw, Equiano, Cugoano Marrant, Samson Occom, Mackenzie and Pratt.

Eighteenth-Century Manners of Reading

Eighteenth-Century Manners of Reading
Author: Eve Tavor Bannet
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2017-11-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108321496

The market for print steadily expanded throughout the eighteenth-century Atlantic world thanks to printers' efforts to ensure that ordinary people knew how to read and use printed matter. Reading is and was a collection of practices, performed in diverse, but always very specific ways. These practices were spread down the social hierarchy through printed guides. Eve Tavor Bannet explores guides to six manners or methods of reading, each with its own social, economic, commercial, intellectual and pedagogical functions, and each promoting a variety of fragmentary and discontinuous reading practices. The increasingly widespread production of periodicals, pamphlets, prefaces, conduct books, conversation-pieces and fictions, together with schoolbooks designed for adults and children, disseminated all that people of all ages and ranks might need or wish to know about reading, and prepared them for new jobs and roles both in Britain and America.

Speculative Fictions

Speculative Fictions
Author: Elizabeth Hewitt
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2020-06-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192602985

Speculative Fictions places Alexander Hamilton at the center of American literary history to consider the important intersections between economics and literature. By studying Hamilton as an economic and imaginative writer, it argues that we can recast the conflict with the Jeffersonians as a literary debate about the best way to explain and describe modern capitalism, and explores how various other literary forms allow us to comprehend the complexities of a modern global economy in entirely new ways. Speculative Fictions identifies two overlooked literary genres of the late eighteenth-century as exemplary of this narrative mode. It asks that we read periodical essays and Black Atlantic captivity narratives with an eye not towards bourgeois subject formation, but as descriptive analyses of economic systems. In doing so, we discover how these two literary genres offer very different portraits of a global economy than that rendered by the novel, the imaginative genre we are most likely to associate with modern capitalism. Developing an aesthetic appreciation for the speculative, digressive, and unsystematic plotlines of these earlier narratives has the capacity to generate new imaginative projects with which to make sense of our increasingly difficult economic world.

Samuel Richardson in Context

Samuel Richardson in Context
Author: Peter Sabor
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 591
Release: 2017-09-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108325963

Since the publication of his novel Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded in 1740, Samuel Richardson's place in the English literary tradition has been secured. But how can that place best be described? Over the three centuries since embarking on his printing career the 'divine' novelist has been variously understood as moral crusader, advocate for women, pioneer of the realist novel and print innovator. Situating Richardson's work within these social, intellectual and material contexts, this new volume of essays identifies his centrality to the emergence of the novel, the self-help book, and the idea of the professional author, as well as his influence on the development of the modern English language, the capitalist economy, and gendered, medicalized, urban, and national identities. This book enables a fuller understanding and appreciation of Richardson's life, work and legacy, and points the way for future studies of one of English literature's most celebrated novelists.

The Cambridge Companion to ‘Robinson Crusoe'

The Cambridge Companion to ‘Robinson Crusoe'
Author: John Richetti
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2018-04-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108634206

An instant success in its own time, Daniel Defoe's The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe has for three centuries drawn readers to its archetypal hero, the man surviving alone on an island. This Companion begins by studying the eighteenth-century literary, historical and cultural contexts of Defoe's novel, exploring the reasons for its immense popularity in Britain and in its colonies in America and in the wider European world. Chapters from leading scholars discuss the social, economic and political dimensions of Crusoe's island story before examining the 'after life' of Robinson Crusoe, from the book's multitudinous translations to its cultural migrations and transformations into other media such as film and television. By considering Defoe's seminal work from a variety of critical perspectives, this book provides a full understanding of the perennial fascination with, and the enduring legacy of, both the book and its iconic hero.

Migrant Representations

Migrant Representations
Author: Peter Leese
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2022-01-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1802070710

Migrant Representations pairs twenty-four carefully selected histories in order to compare how migrants themselves – Irish labourer, Lithuanian refugee or Indian doctor – and their social investigators capture in words and images defining private and historical moments. These comparative case studies from the 1780s to the 2000s explore how migrants constructed their own narratives of mobility and settlement through procedures of reflecting, remembering and recording. Moreover, these studies examine how speech, writing, and picture were used, for instance, by a missionary, social scientist or activist to make ‘outside’ representations of the migrant. Such life-stories, social surveys, and pictures emerge as alternative archives. Leese’s transnational, cultural history considers life-story forms and their uses; the tension between external surveillance and self-observation; the power of narratives to afford legibility and acknowledgement. Leese argues that, historically and in the present, first-person migrant stories and outsider investigations create a continuous charged exchange of views where both migrant and observer negotiate position, authority, authenticity, and potential advantage. Within the history of migrant representations this exchange generates a persistent, subversive strain of opposition and critique. Such self-observations, observations of others, and images never settle.

Imaginary Empires

Imaginary Empires
Author: Maria O'Malley
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2022-12-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0807179256

In Imaginary Empires, Maria O’Malley examines early American texts published between 1767 and 1867 whose narratives represent women’s engagement in the formation of empire. Her analysis unearths a variety of responses to contact, exchange, and cohabitation in the early United States, stressing the possibilities inherent in the literary to foster participation, resignification, and rapprochement. New readings of The Female American, Leonora Sansay’s Secret History, Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, Lydia Maria Child’s A Romance of the Republic, and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl confound the metaphors of ghosts, haunting, and amnesia that proliferate in many recent studies of early US literary history. Instead, as O’Malley shows, these writings foreground acts of foundational violence involved in the militarization of domestic spaces, the legal impediments to the transfer of property and wealth, and the geopolitical standing of the United States. Racialized and gendered figures in the texts refuse to die, leave, or stay silent. In imagining different kinds of futures, these writers reckon with the ambivalent role of women in empire-building as they negotiate between their own subordinate position in society and their exertion of sovereignty over others. By tracing a thread of virtual history found in works by women, Imaginary Empires explores how reflections of the past offer a means of shaping future sociopolitical formations.

Companion to the History of the Book

Companion to the History of the Book
Author: Simon Eliot
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 976
Release: 2019-08-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 111901820X

The celebrated text on the history of the book, completely revised, updated and expanded The revised and updated edition of The Companion to the History of the Book offers a global survey of the book’s history, through print and electronic text. Already well established as a standard survey of the historiography of the book, this new, expanded edition draws on a decade of advanced scholarship to present current research on paper, printing, binding, scientific publishing, the history of maps, music and print, the profession of authorship and lexicography. The text explores the many approaches to the book from the early clay tablets of Sumer, Assyria and Babylonia to today’s burgeoning electronic devices. The expert contributions delve into such fascinating topics as archives and paperwork, and present new chapters on Arabic script, the Slavic, Canadian, African and Australasian book, new textual technologies, and much more. Containing a wealth of illustrative examples and case studies to dramatize the exciting history of the book, the text is designed for academics, students and anyone interested in the subject.

Worlding America

Worlding America
Author: Oliver Scheiding
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2014-10-22
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0804792593

Worlding America explores the circulation of short narratives in the early Americas through a combination of neglected primary materials and scholarly commentary. Building on recent reconsiderations of American literature in light of transnational and hemispheric approaches, it follows the migration of stories from various backgrounds and demonstrates how forms and themes developed in a new literary market that spanned the Atlantic world. While short narratives prior to 1800 have been largely excluded from critical discussions as well as anthologies, they give insight into the conditions of publishing and writing as well as the demand for brief, entertaining pieces that was met by a wide variety of sources, including sermons, letters, diaries, travelogues, and, eventually, magazines and newspapers. Breaking with traditional concepts of period, authorship, and genre, Worlding America groups the different types of narratives it anthologizes according to key subject areas such as "Life Writing," "Female Agency," or the "Cultures of Print." Each section is introduced by a headnote that explains relevant historical and literary developments, situating each narrative in its cultural context and providing its publication history. Suggestions for further reading will also be appreciated by scholars and students wishing to pursue research in these underrepresented forms.

A History of English Autobiography

A History of English Autobiography
Author: Adam Smyth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 455
Release: 2016-04-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1107078415

This History explores the genealogy of autobiographical writing in England from the medieval period to the digital era.