{"title":"Material Texts","description":"\u003cp\u003eDelve into the fascinating world of \"Material Texts\", a series exploring the rich history and cultural significance of books and written communication. Perfect for bibliophiles and history enthusiasts alike.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"sociable-knowledge-book-elizabeth-yale-9780812247817","title":"Sociable Knowledge","description":"Working with the technologies of pen and paper, scissors and glue, naturalists in early modern England, Scotland, and Wales wrote, revised, and recombined their words, sometimes over a period of many years, before fixing them in printed form. They built up their stocks of papers by sharing these materials through postal and less formal carrier services. They exchanged letters, loose notes, drawings and plans, commonplace books, as well as lengthy treatises, ever-expanding repositories for new knowledge about nature and history as it accumulated through reading, observation, correspondence, and conversation. These textual collections grew alongside cabinets of natural specimens, antiquarian objects, and other curiosities—insects pinned in boxes, leaves and flowers pressed in books, rocks and fossils, ancient coins and amulets, and drafts of stone monuments and inscriptions. The goal of all this collecting and sharing, Elizabeth Yale claims, was to create channels through which naturalists and antiquaries could pool their fragmented knowledge of the hyperlocal and curious into an understanding and representation of Britain as a unified historical and geographical space.  Sociable Knowledge pays careful attention to the concrete and the particular: the manuscript almost lost off the back of the mail carrier's cart, the proper ways to package live plants for transport, the kin relationships through which research questionnaires were distributed. The book shows how naturalists used print instruments to garner financing and content from correspondents and how they relied upon research travel—going out into the field—to make and refresh social connections. By moving beyond an easy distinction between print and scribal cultures, Yale reconstructs not just the collaborations of seventeenth-century practitioners who were dispersed across city and country, but also the ways in which the totality of their exchange practices structured early modern scientific knowledge.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49577780478225,"sku":"GOR013020209","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812247817.jpg?v=1763476598"},{"product_id":"curiosities-and-texts-book-marjorie-swann-9780812236101","title":"Curiosities and Texts","description":"A craze for collecting swept England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Aristocrats and middling-sort men alike crammed their homes full of a bewildering variety of physical objects: antique coins, scientific instruments, minerals, mummified corpses, zoological specimens, plants, ethnographic objects from Asia and the Americas, statues, portraits. Why were these bizarre jumbles of artifacts so popular?  In Curiosities and Texts, Marjorie Swann demonstrates that collections of physical objects were central to early modern English literature and culture. Swann examines the famous collection of rarities assembled by the Tradescant family; the development of English natural history; narrative catalogs of English landscape features that began to appear in the Tudor and Stuart periods; the writings of Ben Jonson and Robert Herrick; and the foundation of the British Museum.  Through this wide-ranging series of case studies, Swann addresses two important questions: How was the collection, which was understood as a form of cultural capital, appropriated in early modern England to construct new social selves and modes of subjectivity? And how did literary texts-both as material objects and as vehicles of representation-participate in the process of negotiating the cultural significance of collectors and collecting? Crafting her unique argument with a balance of detail and insight, Swann sheds new light on material culture's relationship to literature, social authority, and personal identity.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49729096614161,"sku":"NGR9780812236101","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52995965747473,"sku":"NIN9780812236101","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812236106.jpg?v=1752314995"},{"product_id":"art-of-allusion-book-sonja-drimmer-9780812250497","title":"The Art of Allusion","description":"At the end of the fourteenth and into the first half of the fifteenth century Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and John Lydgate translated and revised stories with long pedigrees in Latin, Italian, and French. Royals and gentry alike commissioned lavish manuscript copies of these works, copies whose images were integral to the rising prestige of English as a literary language. Yet despite the significance of these images, manuscript illuminators are seldom discussed in the major narratives of the development of English literary culture.  The newly enlarged scale of English manuscript production generated a problem: namely, a need for new images. Not only did these images need to accompany narratives that often had no tradition of illustration, they also had to express novel concepts, including ones as foundational as the identity and suitable representation of an English poet. In devising this new corpus, manuscript artists harnessed visual allusion as a method to articulate central questions and provide at times conflicting answers regarding both literary and cultural authority.  Sonja Drimmer traces how, just as the poets embraced intertexuality as a means of invention, so did illuminators devise new images through referential techniques-assembling, adapting, and combining images from a range of sources in order to answer the need for a new body of pictorial matter. Featuring more than one hundred illustrations, twenty-seven of them in color, The Art of Allusion is the first book devoted to the emergence of England's literary canon as a visual as well as a linguistic event.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49730262040849,"sku":"NGR9780812250497","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50368787087633,"sku":"CIN0812250494G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812250494.jpg?v=1751170123"},{"product_id":"genetic-criticism-book-jed-deppman-9780812237771","title":"Genetic Criticism","description":"This volume introduces English speakers to genetic criticism, arguably the most important critical movement in France today. In recent years, French literary scholars have been exploring the interpretive possibilities of textual history, turning manuscript study into a recognized form of literary criticism. They have clearly demonstrated that manuscripts can be used for purposes other than establishing an accurate text of a work.  Although its raw material is a writer's manuscripts, genetic criticism owes more to structuralist and poststructuralist notions of textuality than to philology and textual criticism. As Genetic Criticism demonstrates, the chief concern is not the \"final\" text but the reconstruction and analysis of the writing process. Geneticists find endless richness in what they call the \"avant-texte\": a critical gathering of a writer's notes, sketches, drafts, manuscripts, typescripts, proofs, and correspondence. Together, the essays in this volume reveal how genetic criticism cooperates with such forms of literary study as narratology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, sociocriticism, deconstruction, and gender theory.  Genetic Criticism contains translations of eleven essays, general theoretical analyses as well as studies of individual authors such as Flaubert, Proust, Joyce, Zola, Stendhal, Chateaubriand, and Montaigne. Some of the essays are foundational statements, while others deal with such recent topics as noncanonical texts and the potential impact of hypertext on genetic study. A general introduction to the book traces genetic criticism's intellectual history, and separate introductions give precise contexts for each essay.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49730473722129,"sku":"NGR9780812237771","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008107479313,"sku":"NIN9780812237771","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53269867102481,"sku":"GOR014848465","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812237773.jpg?v=1752315630"},{"product_id":"broadside-ballad-in-early-modern-england-book-patricia-fumerton-9780812252316","title":"The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England","description":"A comprehensive presentation and examination of a popular seventeenth-century genre: the English broadside ballad  In its seventeenth-century heyday, the English broadside ballad was a single large sheet of paper printed on one side with multiple woodcut illustrations, a popular tune title, and a poem. Inexpensive, ubiquitous, and fugitive—individual elements migrated freely from one broadside to another—some 11,000 to 12,000 of these artifacts pre-1701 survive, though many others have undoubtedly been lost. Since 2003, Patricia Fumerton and a team of associates at the University of California, Santa Barbara have been finding, digitizing, cataloging, and recording these materials to create the English Broadside Ballad Archive.  In this magisterial and long-awaited volume, Fumerton presents a rich display of the fruits of this work. She tracks the fragmentary assembling and disassembling of two unique extant editions of one broadside ballad and examines the loose network of seventeenth-century ballad collectors who archived what were essentially ephemeral productions. She pays particular attention to Samuel Pepys, who collected and bound into five volumes more than 1,800 ballads, and whose preoccupations with black-letter print, gender, and politics are reflected in and extend beyond his collecting practices. Offering an extensive and expansive reading of an extremely popular and sensational ballad that was printed at least 37 times before 1701, Fumerton highlights the ballad genre's ability to move audiences across time and space. In a concluding chapter, she looks to Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale to analyze the performative potential ballads have in comparison with staged drama.  A broadside ballad cannot be \"read\" without reading it in relation to its images and its tune, Fumerton argues. To that end, The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England features more than 80 illustrations and directs its readers to a specially constructed online archive where they can easily access 48 audio files of ballad music.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49740304023825,"sku":"NGR9780812252316","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52849098850577,"sku":"NIN9780812252316","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812252314.jpg?v=1752316781"},{"product_id":"after-augustine-book-brian-stock-9780812236026","title":"After Augustine","description":"Augustine of Hippo was the most prolific and influential writer on reading between antiquity and the Renaissance, though he left no systematic treatise on the subject. His reluctance to synthesize his views on other important themes such as the sacraments suggests that he would have been skeptical of any attempt to bring his statements on reading into a formal theory. Yet Augustine has remained the point of reference to which all later writers invariably return in their search for the roots of problems concerning reading and interpretation in the West.  Using Augustine as the touchstone, Brian Stock considers the evolution of the meditative reader within Western reading practices from classical times to the Renaissance. He looks to the problem of self-knowledge in the reading culture of late antiquity; engages the related question of ethical values and literary experience in the same period; and reconsiders Erich Auerbach's interpretation of ancient literary realism.  In subsequent chapters, Stock moves forward to the Middle Ages to explore the attitude of medieval Latin authors toward the genre of autobiography as a model for self-representation and takes up the problem of reading, writing, and the self in Petrarch. He compares the role of the reader in Augustine's City of God and Thomas More's Utopia, and, in a final important move, reframes the problem of European cultural identity by shifting attention from the continuity and change in spoken language to significant shifts in the practice of spiritual, silent reading in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. A richly rewarding reflection on the history and nature of reading, After Augustine promises to be a centerpiece of discussions about the discovery of the self through literature.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49769673883921,"sku":"CIN0812236025VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50368342032657,"sku":"CIN0812236025G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007823053073,"sku":"NIN9780812236026","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51523906208017,"sku":"GOR008645951","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812236025.jpg?v=1752315876"},{"product_id":"inventing-exoticism-book-benjamin-schmidt-9780812246469","title":"Inventing Exoticism","description":"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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49770549707025,"sku":"GOR013780611","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50094796112145,"sku":"CIN0812246462VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812246462.jpg?v=1763477622"},{"product_id":"divine-art-infernal-machine-book-elizabeth-l-eisenstein-9780812242805","title":"Divine Art, Infernal Machine","description":"There is a longstanding confusion of Johann Fust, Gutenberg's one-time business partner, with the notorious Doctor Faustus. The association is not surprising to Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, for from its very early days the printing press was viewed by some as black magic. For the most part, however, it was welcomed as a \"divine art\" by Western churchmen and statesmen. Sixteenth-century Lutherans hailed it for emancipating Germans from papal rule, and seventeenth-century English radicals viewed it as a weapon against bishops and kings. While an early colonial governor of Virginia thanked God for the absence of printing in his colony, a century later, revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic paid tribute to Gutenberg for setting in motion an irreversible movement that undermined the rule of priests and kings. Yet scholars continued to praise printing as a peaceful art. They celebrated the advancement of learning while expressing concern about information overload.   In Divine Art, Infernal Machine, Eisenstein, author of the hugely influential The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, has written a magisterial and highly readable account of five centuries of ambivalent attitudes toward printing and printers. Once again, she makes a compelling case for the ways in which technological developments and cultural shifts are intimately related. Always keeping an eye on the present, she recalls how, in the nineteenth century, the steam press was seen both as a giant engine of progress and as signaling the end of a golden age. Predictions that the newspaper would supersede the book proved to be false, and Eisenstein is equally skeptical of pronouncements of the supersession of print by the digital.   The use of print has always entailed ambivalence about serving the muses as opposed to profiting from the marketing of commodities. Somewhat newer is the tension between the perceived need to preserve an ever-increasing mass of texts against the very real space and resource constraints of bricks-and-mortar libraries. Whatever the multimedia future may hold, Eisenstein notes, our attitudes toward print will never be monolithic. For now, however, reports of its death are greatly exaggerated.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49996923928849,"sku":"CIN0812242807G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812242807.jpg?v=1751075913"},{"product_id":"american-literature-and-the-culture-of-reprinting-1834-1853-book-meredith-l-mcgill-9780812219951","title":"American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853","description":"The antebellum period has long been identified with the belated emergence of a truly national literature. And yet, as Meredith L. McGill argues, a mass market for books in this period was built and sustained through what we would call rampant literary piracy: a national literature developed not despite but because of the systematic copying of foreign works. Restoring a political dimension to accounts of the economic grounds of antebellum literature, McGill unfolds the legal arguments and political struggles that produced an American \"culture of reprinting\" and held it in place for two crucial decades.   In this culture of reprinting, the circulation of print outstripped authorial and editorial control. McGill examines the workings of literary culture within this market, shifting her gaze from first and authorized editions to reprints and piracies, from the form of the book to the intersection of book and periodical publishing, and from a national literature to an internally divided and transatlantic literary marketplace. Through readings of the work of Dickens, Poe, and Hawthorne, McGill seeks both to analyze how changes in the conditions of publication influenced literary form and to measure what was lost as literary markets became centralized and literary culture became stratified in the early 1850s. American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 delineates a distinctive literary culture that was regional in articulation and transnational in scope, while questioning the grounds of the startlingly recent but nonetheless powerful equation of the national interest with the extension of authors' rights.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50094854537489,"sku":"CIN0812219953G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007993643281,"sku":"NIN9780812219951","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812219953.jpg?v=1752317037"},{"product_id":"book-traces-book-andrew-m-stauffer-9780812252682","title":"Book Traces","description":"In most college and university libraries, materials published before 1800 have been moved into special collections, while the post-1923 books remain in general circulation. But books published between these dates are vulnerable to deaccessioning, as libraries increasingly reconfigure access to public-domain texts via digital repositories such as Google Books. Even libraries with strong commitments to their print collections are clearing out the duplicates, assuming that circulating copies of any given nineteenth-century edition are essentially identical to one another. When you look closely, however, you see that they are not.  Many nineteenth-century books were donated by alumni or their families decades ago, and many of them bear traces left behind by the people who first owned and used them. In Book Traces, Andrew M. Stauffer adopts what he calls \"guided serendipity\" as a tactic in pursuit of two goals: first, to read nineteenth-century poetry through the clues and objects earlier readers left in their books and, second, to defend the value of keeping the physical volumes on the shelves. Finding in such books of poetry the inscriptions, annotations, and insertions made by their original owners, and using them as exemplary case studies, Stauffer shows how the physical, historical book enables a modern reader to encounter poetry through the eyes of someone for whom it was personal.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50190422475025,"sku":"CIN0812252683VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51287448060177,"sku":"NIN9780812252682","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812252683.jpg?v=1763805635"},{"product_id":"medieval-craft-of-memory-book-mary-carruthers-9780812218817","title":"The Medieval Craft of Memory","description":"In antiquity and the Middle Ages, memory was a craft, and certain actions and tools were thought to be necessary for its creation and recollection. Until now, however, many of the most important visual and textual sources on the topic have remained untranslated or otherwise difficult to consult. Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski bring together the texts and visual images from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries that are central to an understanding of memory and memory technique. These sources are now made available for a wider audience of students of medieval and early modern history and culture and readers with an interest in memory, mnemonics, and the synergy of text and image.  The art of memory was most importantly associated in the Middle Ages with composition, and those who practiced the craft used it to make new prayers, sermons, pictures, and music. The mixing of visual and verbal media was commonplace throughout medieval cultures: pictures contained visual puns, words were often verbal paintings, and both were used equally as tools for making thoughts. The ability to create pictures in one's own mind was essential to medieval cognitive technique and imagination, and the intensely pictorial and affective qualities of medieval art and literature were generative, creative devices in themselves.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50265439142161,"sku":"CIN0812218817A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50322920079633,"sku":"GOR006949095","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50327640080657,"sku":"CIN0812218817G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007874859281,"sku":"NIN9780812218817","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53532989292817,"sku":"CIN0812218817VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812218817.jpg?v=1752317274"},{"product_id":"london-and-the-making-of-provincial-literature-book-joseph-rezek-9780812247343","title":"London and the Making of Provincial Literature","description":"In the early nineteenth century, London publishers dominated the transatlantic book trade. No one felt this more keenly than authors from Ireland, Scotland, and the United States who struggled to establish their own national literary traditions while publishing in the English metropolis. Authors such as Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, Walter Scott, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper devised a range of strategies to transcend the national rivalries of the literary field. By writing prefaces and footnotes addressed to a foreign audience, revising texts specifically for London markets, and celebrating national particularity, provincial authors appealed to English readers with idealistic stories of cross-cultural communion. From within the messy and uneven marketplace for books, Joseph Rezek argues, provincial authors sought to exalt and purify literary exchange. In so doing, they helped shape the Romantic-era belief that literature inhabits an autonomous sphere in society.  London and the Making of Provincial Literature tells an ambitious story about the mutual entanglement of the history of books and the history of aesthetics in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Situated between local literary scenes and a distant cultural capital, enterprising provincial authors and publishers worked to maximize success in London and to burnish their reputations and build their industry at home. Examining the production of books and the circulation of material texts between London and the provincial centers of Dublin, Edinburgh, and Philadelphia, Rezek claims that the publishing vortex of London inspired a dynamic array of economic and aesthetic practices that shaped an era in literary history.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50362202063121,"sku":"CIN0812247345G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812247345.jpg?v=1763477761"},{"product_id":"hitler-s-face-book-claudia-schmlders-9780812220810","title":"Hitler's Face","description":"From his emergence on the German political scene in 1914 and subsequent public infatuation with him, to his fall in 1945 and the growing revulsion as his horrific acts were revealed to the world, Adolf Hitler's visage, Claudia Schmoelders argues, was the first political image manufactured for the modern media.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50363205026065,"sku":"CIN0812220811G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812220811.jpg?v=1763483261"},{"product_id":"reading-the-qur-an-in-latin-christendom-1140-1560-book-thomas-e-burman-9780812220629","title":"Reading the Qur'an in Latin Christendom, 1140-1560","description":"Addressing Christian-Muslim relations generally, as well as the histories of reading and the book, Burman offers a balanced and hands-on picture of the ways Europeans read the sacred text of Islam.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50368095551761,"sku":"CIN0812220625G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007957598481,"sku":"NIN9780812220629","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812220625.jpg?v=1752316147"},{"product_id":"ways-of-writing-book-david-d-hall-9780812222081","title":"Ways of Writing","description":"Writers abounded in seventeenth-century New England. From the moment of colonization and constantly thereafter, hundreds of people set pen to paper in the course of their lives, some to write letters that others recopied, some to compose sermons as part of their life work as ministers, dozens to attempt verse, and many more to narrate a remarkable experience, provide written testimony to a civil court, participate in a controversy, or keep some sort of records—and of these everyday forms of writing there was no limit.   Every colonial writer knew of two different modes of publication, each with its distinctive benefits and limitations. One was to entrust a manuscript to a printer who would set type and impose it on sheets of paper that were bound up into a book. The other was to make handwritten copies or have others make copies, possibly unauthorized. Among the colonists, the terms \"publishing\" and \"book\" referred to both of these technologies. Ways of Writing is about the making of texts in the seventeenth century, whether they were fashioned into printed books or circulated in handwritten form. The latter mode of publishing was remarkably common, yet it is much less understood or acknowledged than transmission in print. Indeed, certain writers, including famous ones such as John Winthrop and William Bradford, employed scribal publication almost exclusively; the Antimonian controversy of 1636-38 was carried out by this means until manuscripts relating to the struggle began to be printed in England.   Examining printed texts as well as those that were handwritten, David D. Hall explores the practices associated with anonymity, dedications, prefaces, errata, and the like. He also surveys the meaning of authority and authenticity, demonstrating how so many texts were prepared by intermediaries, not by authors, thus contributing to the history of \"social\" or collaborative authorship. 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Reading Children offers a history of the relationship between children and books in Anglo-American modernity, exploring long-lived but now forgotten early children's literature, discredited yet highly influential pedagogical practices, the property lessons inherent in children's book ownership, and the emergence of childhood itself as a literary property.  The nursery and schoolroom version of the social contract, Crain argues, underwrote children's entry not only into reading and writing but also into a world of commodity and property relations. Increasingly positioned as an indispensable form of cultural capital by the end of the eighteenth century, literacy became both the means and the symbol of children's newly recognized self-possession and autonomy. At the same time, as children's legal and economic status was changing, \"childhood\" emerged as an object of nostalgia for adults. Literature for children enacted the terms of children's self-possession, often with explicit references to property, contracts, or inheritances, and yet also framed adult longing for an imagined past called \"childhood.\"  Dozens of colorful illustrations chart the ways in which early literature for children was transformed into spectacle through new image technologies and a burgeoning marketplace that capitalized on nostalgic fantasies of childhood conflated with bowdlerized fantasies of history. Reading Children offers new terms for thinking about the imbricated and mutually constitutive histories of literacy, property, and childhood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that ground current anxieties and long-held beliefs about childhood and reading.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50368205226257,"sku":"CIN0812223535G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812223535.jpg?v=1763485436"},{"product_id":"bitstreams-book-matthew-g-kirschenbaum-9780812224955","title":"Bitstreams","description":"What are the future prospects for literary knowledge now that literary texts—and the material remains of authorship, publishing, and reading—are reduced to bitstreams, strings of digital ones and zeros? What are the opportunities and obligations for book history, textual criticism, and bibliography when literary texts are distributed across digital platforms, devices, formats, and networks? Indeed, what is textual scholarship when the \"text\" of our everyday speech is a verb as often as it is a noun?  These are the questions that motivate Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in Bitstreams, a distillation of twenty years of thinking about the intersection of digital media, textual studies, and literary archives. With an intimate narrative style that belies the cold technics of computing, Kirschenbaum takes the reader into the library where all access to Toni Morrison's \"papers\" is mediated by digital technology; to the bitmapped fonts of Kamau Brathwaite's Macintosh; to the process of recovering and restoring fourteen lost \"HyperPoems\" by the noted poet William Dickey; and finally, into the offices of Melcher Media, a small boutique design studio reimagining the future of the codex.  A persistent theme is that bits—the ubiquitous ones and zeros of computing—are never self-identical, but always inflected by the material realities of particular systems, platforms, and protocols. These materialities are not liabilities: they are the very bulwark on which we stake the enterprise for preserving the future of literary heritage.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50368257949969,"sku":"CIN0812224957G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008105120017,"sku":"NIN9780812224955","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812224957.jpg?v=1763472946"},{"product_id":"devil-in-the-holy-water-or-the-art-of-slander-from-louis-xiv-to-napoleon-book-robert-darnton-9780812221718","title":"The Devil in the Holy Water, or the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon","description":"Slander has always been a nasty business, Robert Darnton notes, but that is no reason to consider it a topic unworthy of inquiry. By destroying reputations, it has often helped to delegitimize regimes and bring down governments. Nowhere has this been more the case than in eighteenth-century France, when a ragtag group of literary libelers flooded the market with works that purported to expose the wicked behavior of the great. Salacious or seditious, outrageous or hilarious, their books and pamphlets claimed to reveal the secret doings of kings and their mistresses, the lewd and extravagant activities of an unpopular foreign-born queen, and the affairs of aristocrats and men-about-town as they consorted with servants, monks, and dancing masters. These libels often mixed scandal with detailed accounts of contemporary history and current politics. And though they are now largely forgotten, many sold as well as or better than some of the most famous works of the Enlightenment.  In The Devil in the Holy Water, Darnton—winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for his Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France and author of his own best-sellers, The Great Cat Massacre and George Washington's False Teeth—offers a startling new perspective on the origins of the French Revolution and the development of a revolutionary political culture in the years after 1789. He opens with an account of the colony of French refugees in London who churned out slanderous attacks on public figures in Versailles and of the secret agents sent over from Paris to squelch them. The libelers were not above extorting money for pretending to destroy the print runs of books they had duped the government agents into believing existed; the agents were not above recognizing the lucrative nature of such activities—and changing sides.  As the Revolution gave way to the Terror, Darnton demonstrates, the substance of libels changed while the form remained much the same. With the wit and erudition that has made him one of the world's most eminent historians of eighteenth-century France, he here weaves a tale so full of intrigue that it may seem too extravagant to be true, although all its details can be confirmed in the archives of the French police and diplomatic service. Part detective story, part revolutionary history, The Devil in the Holy Water has much to tell us about the nature of authorship and the book trade, about Grub Street journalism and the shaping of public opinion, and about the important work that scurrilous words have done in many times and places.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50425288327441,"sku":"CIN0812221710A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007864996113,"sku":"NIN9780812221718","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812221710.jpg?v=1752315649"},{"product_id":"engaging-the-ottoman-empire-book-daniel-o-quinn-9780812250602","title":"Engaging the Ottoman Empire","description":"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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50452296630545,"sku":"CIN0812250605G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50876828975377,"sku":"CIN0812250605VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}]},{"product_id":"engaging-the-ottoman-empire-book-daniel-o-quinn-9781512825534","title":"Engaging the Ottoman Empire","description":"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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50464228573457,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50464229163281,"sku":"NGR9781512825534","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52749987447057,"sku":"NIN9781512825534","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1512825530.jpg?v=1763221450"},{"product_id":"star-territory-book-gordon-fraser-9780812252927","title":"Star Territory","description":"The United States has been a space power since its founding, Gordon Fraser writes. The white stars on its flag reveal the dream of continental elites that the former colonies might constitute a \"new constellation\" in the firmament of nations. The streets and avenues of its capital city were mapped in reference to celestial observations. And as the nineteenth century unfolded, all efforts to colonize the North American continent depended upon the science of surveying, or mapping with reference to celestial movement. Through its built environment, cultural mythology, and exercise of military power, the United States has always treated the cosmos as a territory available for exploitation.  In Star Territory Fraser explores how from its beginning, agents of the state, including President John Adams, Admiral Charles Henry Davis, and astronomer Maria Mitchell, participated in large-scale efforts to map the nation onto cosmic space. Through almanacs, maps, and star charts, practical information and exceptionalist mythologies were transmitted to the nation's soldiers, scientists, and citizens.  This is, however, only one part of the story Fraser tells. From the country's first Black surveyors, seamen, and publishers to the elected officials of the Cherokee Nation and Hawaiian resistance leaders, other actors established alternative cosmic communities. These Black and indigenous astronomers, prophets, and printers offered ways of understanding the heavens that broke from the work of the U.S. officials for whom the universe was merely measurable and exploitable.  Today, NASA administrators advocate public-private partnerships for the development of space commerce while the military seeks to control strategic regions above the atmosphere. If observers imagine that these developments are the direct offshoots of a mid-twentieth-century space race, Fraser brilliantly demonstrates otherwise. The United States' efforts to exploit the cosmos, as well as the resistance to these efforts, have a history that starts nearly two centuries before the Gemini and Apollo missions of the 1960s.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50469419974929,"sku":"GOR013791811","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007926108433,"sku":"NIN9780812252927","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812252926.jpg?v=1752315792"},{"product_id":"ways-of-writing-book-david-d-hall-9780812241020","title":"Ways of Writing","description":"Ways of Writing is about the making of texts in seventeenth-century New England, whether they were fashioned into printed books or disseminated in handwritten form. David D. Hall explores issues of authority and authenticity, the roles of intermediaries, and the political and social contexts of publication, among other issues.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50478691352849,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50478691614993,"sku":"CIN0812241029G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812241029.jpg?v=1750946662"},{"product_id":"inscription-and-erasure-book-roger-chartier-9780812220469","title":"Inscription and Erasure","description":"The fear of oblivion obsessed medieval and early modern Europe. Stone, wood, cloth, parchment, and paper all provided media onto which writing was inscribed as a way to ward off loss. And the task was not easy in a world in which writing could be destroyed, manuscripts lost, or books menaced with destruction. Paradoxically, the successful spread of printing posed another danger, namely, that an uncontrollable proliferation of textual materials, of matter without order or limit, might allow useless texts to multiply and smother thought. Not everything written was destined for the archives; indeed, much was written on surfaces that allowed one to write, erase, then write again.   In Inscription and Erasure, Roger Chartier seeks to demonstrate how the tension between these two concerns played out in the imaginative works of their times. Chartier examines how authors transformed the material realities of writing and publication into an aesthetic resource exploited for poetic, dramatic, or narrative ends. The process that gave form to writing in its various modes—public or private, ephemeral or permanent—thus became the very material of literary invention. Chartier's chapters follow a thread of reading and interpretation that takes us from the twelfth-century French poet Baudri of Bourgueil, sketching out his poems on wax tablets before they are committed to parchment, through Cervantes in the seventeenth century, who places a \"book of memory,\" in which poems and letters are to be recopied, in the path of his fictional Don Quixote.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50582718349585,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50582718578961,"sku":"GOR013365007","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53149892935953,"sku":"NIN9780812220469","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812220463.jpg?v=1752315377"},{"product_id":"tabula-picta-book-marta-madero-9780812241860","title":"Tabula Picta","description":"To whom does a painted tablet—a tabula picta—belong? To the owner of the physical piece of wood on which an image is painted? Or to the person who made the painting on that piece of wood? By extension, one might ask, who is the owner of a text? Is it the person who has written the words, or the individual who possesses the piece of parchment or slab of stone on which those words are inscribed?  In Tabula Picta Marta Madero turns to the extensive glosses and commentaries that medieval jurists dedicated to the above questions when articulating a notion of intellectual and artistic property radically different from our own. The most important goal for these legal thinkers, Madero argues, was to situate things—whatever they might be—within a logical framework that would allow for their description, categorization, and placement within a proper hierarchical order. Only juridical reasoning, they claimed, was capable of sorting out the individual elements that nature or human art had brought together in a single unit; by establishing sets of distinctions and taxonomies worthy of Borges, legal discourse sought to demonstrate that behind the deceptive immediacy of things, lie the concepts and arguments of what one might call the artifices of the concrete.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50832930668817,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50832930799889,"sku":"GOR014090071","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52995967090961,"sku":"NIN9780812241860","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/081224186X.jpg?v=1763475834"},{"product_id":"medieval-english-manuscripts-and-literary-forms-book-jessica-brantley-9780812253849","title":"Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms","description":"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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50886780027153,"sku":"NGR9780812253849","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008037191953,"sku":"NIN9780812253849","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812253841.jpg?v=1752315860"},{"product_id":"used-books-book-william-h-sherman-9780812220841","title":"Used Books","description":"In a recent sale catalog, one bookseller apologized for the condition of a sixteenth-century volume as \"rather soiled by use.\" When the book was displayed the next year, the exhibition catalogue described it as \"well and piously used [with] marginal notations in an Elizabethan hand [that] bring to life an early and earnest owner\"; and the book's buyer, for his part, considered it to be \"enlivened by the marginal notes and comments.\" For this collector, as for an increasing number of cultural historians and historians of the book, a marked-up copy was more interesting than one in pristine condition.  William H. Sherman recovers a culture that took the phrase \"mark my words\" quite literally. Books from the first two centuries of printing are full of marginalia and other signs of engagement and use, such as customized bindings, traces of food and drink, penmanship exercises, and doodles. These marks offer a vast archive of information about the lives of books and their place in the lives of their readers.  Based on a survey of thousands 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. The chapters address the place of book-marking in schools and churches, the use of the \"manicule\" (the ubiquitous hand-with-pointing-finger symbol), the role played by women in information management, the extraordinary commonplace book used for nearly sixty years by Renaissance England's greatest lawyer-statesman, and the attitudes toward annotated books among collectors and librarians from the Middle Ages to the present.  This wide-ranging, learned, and often surprising book will make the marks of Renaissance readers more visible and legible to scholars, collectors, and bibliophiles.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50932974616849,"sku":"GOR009924900","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007917555985,"sku":"NIN9780812220841","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52816291758353,"sku":"CIN0812220846G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812220846.jpg?v=1752315625"},{"product_id":"selling-antislavery-book-teresa-a-goddu-9780812251999","title":"Selling Antislavery","description":"Beginning with its establishment in the early 1830s, the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) recognized the need to reach and consolidate a diverse and increasingly segmented audience. To do so, it produced a wide array of print, material, and visual media: almanacs and slave narratives, pincushions and gift books, broadsides and panoramas. Building on the distinctive practices of British antislavery and evangelical reform movements, the AASS utilized innovative business strategies to market its productions and developed a centralized distribution system to circulate them widely. In Selling Antislavery, Teresa A. Goddu shows how the AASS operated at the forefront of a new culture industry and, by framing its media as cultural commodities, made antislavery sentiments an integral part of an emerging middle-class identity. She contends that, although the AASS's dominance waned after 1840 as the organization splintered, it nevertheless created one of the first national mass markets.  Goddu maps this extensive media culture, focusing in particular on the material produced by AASS in the decade of the 1830s. She considers how the dissemination of its texts, objects, and tactics was facilitated by the quasi-corporate and centralized character of the organization during this period and demonstrates how its institutional presence remained important to the progress of the larger movement. Exploring antislavery's vast archive and explicating its messages, she emphasizes both the discursive and material aspects of antislavery's appeal, providing a richly textured history of the movement through its artifacts and the modes of circulation it put into place.  Featuring more than seventy-five 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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007810961681,"sku":"NIN9780812251999","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812251997.jpg?v=1761389995"},{"product_id":"bibliography-and-the-book-trades-book-hugh-amory-9780812238372","title":"Bibliography and the Book Trades","description":"Hugh Amory (1930-2001) was at once the most rigorous and the most methodologically sophisticated historian of the book in early America. Gathered here are his essays, articles, and lectures on the subject, two of them printed for the first time. An introduction by David D. Hall sets this work in context and indicates its significance; Hall has also provided headnotes for each of the essays.  Amory used his training as a bibliographer to reexamine every major question about printing, bookmaking, and reading in early New England. Who owned Bibles, and in what formats? Did the colonial book trade consist of books imported from Europe or of local production? Can we go behind the iconic status of the Bay Psalm Book to recover its actual history? Was Michael Wigglesworth's Day of Doom really a bestseller? And why did an Indian gravesite contain a scrap of Psalm 98 in a medicine bundle buried with a young Pequot girl?  In answering these and other questions, Amory writes broadly about the social and economic history of printing, bookselling and book ownership. At the heart of his work is a determination to connect the materialities of printed books with the workings of the book trades and, in turn, with how printed books were put to use. This is a collection of great methodological importance for anyone interested in literature and history who wants to make those same connections.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007830294801,"sku":"NIN9780812238372","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812238370.jpg?v=1763479793"},{"product_id":"social-lives-of-poems-in-nineteenth-century-america-book-michael-c-cohen-9780812247084","title":"The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America","description":"Poetry occupied a complex position in the social life of nineteenth-century America. While some readers found in poems a resource for aesthetic pleasure and the enjoyment of linguistic complexity, many others turned to poems for spiritual and psychic wellbeing, adapted popular musical settings of poems to spread scandal and satire, or used poems as a medium for asserting personal and family memories as well as local and national affiliations. Poetry was not only read but memorized and quoted, rewritten and parodied, collected, anthologized, edited, and exchanged.  Michael C. Cohen here explores the multiplicity of imaginative relationships forged between poems and those who made use of them from the post-Revolutionary era to the turn of the twentieth century. Organized along a careful genealogy of ballads in the Atlantic world, The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America demonstrates how the circulation of texts in songs, broadsides, letters, and newsprint as well as in books, anthologies, and critical essays enabled poetry to perform its many different tasks. Considering the media and modes of reading through which people encountered and made sense of poems, Cohen traces the lines of critical interpretations and tracks the emergence and disappearance of poetic genres in American literary culture. Examining well-known works by John Greenleaf Whittier and Walt Whitman as well as popular ballads, minstrel songs, and spirituals, Cohen shows how discourses on poetry served as sites for debates over history, literary culture, citizenship, and racial identity.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007853134097,"sku":"NIN9780812247084","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812247086.jpg?v=1752316551"},{"product_id":"slantwise-moves-book-douglas-a-guerra-9780812250619","title":"Slantwise Moves","description":"In 1860, Milton Bradley invented The Checkered Game of Life. Having journeyed from Springfield, Massachusetts, to New York City to determine interest in this combination of bright red ink, brass dials, and character-driven decision-making, Bradley exhausted his entire supply of merchandise just two days after his arrival in the city; within a few months, he had sold forty thousand copies. That same year, Walt Whitman left Brooklyn to oversee the printing of the third edition of his Leaves of Grass in Massachusetts. In Slantwise Moves, Douglas A. Guerra sees more than mere coincidence in the contemporary popularity of these superficially different cultural productions. Instead, he argues, both the book and the game were materially resonant sites of social experimentation—places where modes of collectivity and selfhood could be enacted and performed.  Then as now, Guerra observes, \"game\" was a malleable category, mediating play in various and inventive ways: through the material forms of pasteboard, paper, and india rubber; via settings like the parlor, lawn, or public hall; and by mutually agreed-upon measurements of success, ranging from point accumulation to the creation of humorous narratives. Recovering the lives of important game designers, anthologists, and codifiers—including Anne Abbot, William Simonds, Michael Phelan, and the aforementioned Bradley—Guerra brings his study of commercially produced games into dialogue with a reconsideration of iconic literary works. Through contrapuntal close readings of texts and gameplay, he finds multiple possibilities for self-fashioning reflected in Bradley's Life and Whitman's \"Song of Myself,\" as well as utopian social spaces on billiard tables and the pages of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance alike.  Highlighting meaningful overlap in the production and reception of books and games, Slantwise Moves identifies what the two have in common as material texts and as critical models of the mundane pleasures and intimacies that defined agency and social belonging in nineteenth-century America.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51007860572433,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007863619857,"sku":"NIN9780812250619","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812250613.jpg?v=1752315585"},{"product_id":"pens-and-needles-book-susan-frye-9780812222524","title":"Pens and Needles","description":"The Renaissance woman, whether privileged or of the artisan or the middle class, was trained in the expressive arts of needlework and painting, which were often given precedence over writing. 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A clerk of the Exchequer for more than four decades under Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I, he rose from obscure origins to a life of opulence; his job, a secure bureaucratic post with a guaranteed income, was the kind of which many men dreamed. Vast sums of money passed through his hands, some of which he used to engage in moneylending and land speculation. He also bought books, lots of them, amassing one of the largest libraries in early modern London.  In 1597, all of this was brought to a halt when Stonley, aged around seventy-seven, was incarcerated in the Fleet Prison, convicted of embezzling the spectacular sum of £13,000 from the Exchequer. His property was sold off, and an inventory was made of his house on Aldersgate Street. This provides our most detailed guide to his lost library. By chance, we also have three handwritten volumes of accounts, in which he earlier itemized his spending on food, clothing, travel, and books. It is here that we learn that on June 12, 1593, he bought \"the Venus \u0026amp; Adhonay per Shakspere\"-the earliest known record of a purchase of Shakespeare's first publication.  In Shakespeare's First Reader, Jason Scott-Warren sets Stonley's journals and inventories of goods alongside a wealth of archival evidence to put his life and library back together again. He shows how Stonley's books were integral to the material worlds he inhabited and the social networks he formed with communities of merchants, printers, recusants, and spies. 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In a compelling and original argument, Gina Bloom demonstrates that early modern ideas about the efficacy of spoken communication spring from an understanding of the voice's materiality. Voices can be cracked by the bodies that produce them, scattered by winds when transmitted as breath through their acoustic environment, stopped by clogged ears meant to receive them, and displaced by echoic resonances. The early modern theater underscored the voice's volatility through the use of pubescent boy actors, whose vocal organs were especially vulnerable to malfunction.  Reading plays by Shakespeare, Marston, and their contemporaries alongside a wide range of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century texts—including anatomy books, acoustic science treatises, Protestant sermons, music manuals, and even translations of Ovid—Bloom maintains that cultural representations and theatrical enactments of the voice as \"unruly matter\" undermined early modern hierarchies of gender. The uncontrollable physical voice creates anxiety for men, whose masculinity is contingent on their capacity to discipline their voices and the voices of their subordinates. By contrast, for women the voice is most effective not when it is owned and mastered but when it is relinquished to the environment beyond. There, the voice's fragile material form assumes its full destabilizing potential and becomes a surprising source of female power. Indeed, Bloom goes further to query the boundary between the production and reception of vocal sound, suggesting provocatively that it is through active listening, not just speaking, that women on and off the stage reshape their world.  Bringing together performance theory, theater history, theories of embodiment, and sound studies, this book makes a significant contribution to gender studies and feminist theory by challenging traditional conceptions of the links among voice, body, and self.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51007964348689,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007967658257,"sku":"NIN9780812240061","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812240065.jpg?v=1752316934"},{"product_id":"prosthetic-tongue-book-katie-chenoweth-9780812251494","title":"The Prosthetic Tongue","description":"Of all the cultural \"revolutions\" brought about by the development of printing technology during the sixteenth century, perhaps the most remarkable but least understood is the purported rise of European vernacular languages. It is generally accepted that the invention of printing constitutes an event in the history of language that has profoundly shaped modernity, and yet the exact nature of this transformation—the mechanics of the event—has remained curiously unexamined.  In The Prosthetic Tongue, Katie Chenoweth explores the relationship between printing and the vernacular 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. Under François I, the king known in his own time as the \"Father of Letters,\" both printing and vernacular language emerged as major cultural and political forces. Beginning in 1529, French underwent a remarkable transformation, as printers and writers began to reimagine their mother tongue as mechanically reproducible. The first accent marks appeared in French texts, the first French grammar books and dictionaries were published, phonetic spelling reforms were debated, modern Roman typefaces replaced gothic scripts, and French was codified as a legal idiom.  This was, Chenoweth argues, a veritable \"new media\" moment, in which the print medium served as the underlying material apparatus and conceptual framework for a revolutionary reinvention of the vernacular. Rather than tell the story of the origin of the modern French language, however, she seeks to destabilize this very notion of \"origin\" by situating the cultural formation of French in a scene of media technology and reproducibility. No less than the paper book issuing from sixteenth-century printing presses, the modern French language is a product of the age of mechanical reproduction.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007976177937,"sku":"NIN9780812251494","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812251490.jpg?v=1761391235"},{"product_id":"fair-copy-book-jennifer-putzi-9780812253467","title":"Fair Copy","description":"In Fair Copy Jennifer Putzi studies the composition, publication, and circulation of American women's poetry in the antebellum United States. In opposition to a traditional scholarly emphasis on originality and individuality, or a recovery method centered on author-based interventions, Putzi proposes a theory and methodology of relational poetics: focusing on poetry written by working-class and African American women poets, she 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. Yet it is their very relationality which has led to these poems and the poets who published them being written out of literary history. Fair Copy models a radical reading and recovery of this work in a way that will redirect the study of nineteenth-century American women's poetry.  Beginning with Lydia Huntley Sigourney and ending with Elizabeth Akers Allen and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Putzi argues that relational practices like imitation, community, and collaboration distinguished the poetry of antebellum American women, especially those whose access to print was mediated by class or race. To demonstrate this point, she recovers poetry by the \"factory girls\" of the Lowell Offering, African American poet Sarah Forten, and domestic servant Maria James, whose volume Wales, and Other Poems was published in 1839. Putzi's work reveals a careful navigation of the path to print for each of these writers, as well as a fierce claim to poetry and all that it represented in the antebellum United States.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51007979913489,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007982305553,"sku":"NIN9780812253467","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812253469.jpg?v=1763480370"},{"product_id":"plagiarism-and-literary-property-in-the-romantic-period-book-tilar-j-mazzeo-9780812239676","title":"Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period","description":"In a series of articles published in Tait's Magazine in 1834, Thomas DeQuincey catalogued four potential instances of plagiarism in the work of his friend and literary competitor Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 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The book offers a major reassessment of the role of borrowing, textual appropriation, and narrative mastery in British Romantic literature and provides a new picture of the period and its central aesthetic contests. 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At the turn to the eighteenth century, European markets were flooded by books and artifacts that described or otherwise evoked non-European realms: histories and ethnographies of overseas kingdoms, travel narratives and decorative maps, lavishly produced tomes illustrating foreign flora and fauna, and numerous decorative objects in the styles of distant cultures. Inventing Exoticism meticulously analyzes these, while further identifying the particular role of the Dutch-\"Carryers of the World,\" as Defoe famously called them-in the business of exotica. The form of early modern exoticism that sold so well, as this book shows, originated not with expansion-minded imperialists of London and Paris, but in the canny ateliers of Holland. By scrutinizing these materials from the perspectives of both producers and consumers-and paying close attention to processes of cultural mediation-Inventing Exoticism interrogates traditional postcolonial theories of knowledge and power. 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Sonja Drimmer traces how, just as the poets embraced intertexuality as a means of invention, so did illuminators devise new images through referential techniques—assembling, adapting, and combining images from a range of sources in order to answer the need for a new body of pictorial matter. Featuring more than one hundred illustrations, twenty-seven of them in color, The Art of Allusion is the first book devoted to the emergence of England's literary canon as a visual as well as a linguistic event.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51008013271313,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008016122129,"sku":"NIN9780812224849","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812224841.jpg?v=1763475295"},{"product_id":"literary-market-book-geoffrey-turnovsky-9780812241952","title":"The Literary Market","description":"A central theme in the history of Old Regime authorship highlights the opportunities offered by a growing book trade to writers seeking to free themselves from patrons and live \"by the pen.\" Accounts of this passage from patronage to market have explored in far greater detail the opportunities themselves—the rising sums paid by publishers and the progression of laws protecting literary property—than how and why writers would have seized on them, no doubt because the choice to do so has seemed an obvious or natural one for writers assumed to prefer economic self-sufficiency over elite protection.  In The Literary Market, Geoffrey Turnovsky claims that there was nothing obvious or natural about the choice. Writers had been involved in commercial book publication since the earliest days of the printing press, yet had not necessarily linked these activities with their freedom to think and write. The association of autonomy and professionalism was forged, not given. Analyzing the literary market as a key articulation of the association, Turnovsky explores how in eighteenth-century polemics a rhetoric of commercial authorship came to signify independence for intellectuals. He finds the roots of the connection not in the claims of entrepreneurial writers to rights and income but in a world to which that of the modern author has been contrasted: the aristocratic culture of the seventeenth century. Aristocratic culture, he argues, generated a disparaging view of the professional author as one defined by activities tainting him or her as greedy and arrogant and therefore unworthy of protection and socially isolated. The Literary Market examines the story of the \"birth of the author\" in terms of the revalorization of this negative trope in Enlightenment-era debates about the radically changing role of writers in society.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51008020644113,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008023822609,"sku":"NIN9780812241952","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812241959.jpg?v=1763475633"},{"product_id":"queer-philologies-book-jeffrey-masten-9780812224245","title":"Queer Philologies","description":"For Jeffrey Masten, the history of sexuality and the history of language are intimately related. In Queer Philologies, he studies particular terms that illuminate the history of sexuality in Shakespeare's time and analyzes the methods we have used to study sex and gender in literary and cultural history. Building on the work of theorists and historians who have, following Foucault, investigated the importance of words like \"homosexual,\" \"sodomy,\" and \"tribade\" in a variety of cultures and historical periods, Masten argues that just as the history of sexuality requires the history of language, so too does philology, \"the love of the word,\" require the analytical lens provided by the study of sexuality.  Masten unpacks the etymology, circulation, transformation, and constitutive power of key words within the early modern discourse of sex and gender—terms such as \"conversation\" and \"intercourse,\" \"fundament\" and \"foundation,\" \"friend\" and \"boy\"—that described bodies, pleasures, emotions, sexual acts, even (to the extent possible in this period) sexual identities. Analyzing the continuities as well as differences between Shakespeare's language and our own, he offers up a queer lexicon in which the letter \"Q\" is perhaps the queerest character of all.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51008066060561,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008070058257,"sku":"NIN9780812224245","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51695209709841,"sku":"CIN0812224248G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812224248.jpg?v=1763474277"},{"product_id":"jeremiah-s-scribes-book-meredith-marie-neuman-9780812245059","title":"Jeremiah's Scribes","description":"New England Puritan sermon culture was primarily an oral phenomenon, and yet its literary production has been understood mainly through a print legacy. In Jeremiah's Scribes, Meredith Marie Neuman turns to the notes taken by Puritan auditors in the meetinghouse in order to fill out our sense of the lived experience of the sermon. By reconstructing the aural culture of sermons, Neuman shifts our attention from the pulpit to the pew to demonstrate the many ways in which sermon auditors helped to shape this dominant genre of Puritan New England.  Tracing the material transmission of sermon texts by readers and writers, hearers and notetakers, Jeremiah's Scribes challenges the notion of stable authorship by individual ministers. Instead, Neuman illuminates a mode of textual production that pervaded communities and occurred in the overlapping media of print, manuscript, and speech. Even printed sermons, she demonstrates, bore the traces of their roots in the oral culture of the meetinghouse.  Bringing material considerations to bear on anxieties over the perceived relationship between divine and human language, Jeremiah's Scribes broadens our understanding of all Puritan literature. Neuman examines the controlling logic of the sermon in relation to nonsermonic writing—such as conversion narrative—ultimately suggesting the fundamental permeability among disparate genres of Puritan writing.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008088113425,"sku":"NIN9780812245059","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812245059.jpg?v=1751330002"},{"product_id":"won-in-translation-book-roger-chartier-9780812253832","title":"Won in Translation","description":"In Won in Translation Roger Chartier, one of the world's leading historians of books, publishing, and reading, 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.  Won in Translation proceeds by way of four case studies, three dedicated to works originally in Spanish, the fourth to a Portuguese dramatic adaptation of Don Quixote. Bartolomé de Las Casas' Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, first printed in 1552, was a powerful instrument for the construction of what was later called the \"black legend\" of Spanish monarchy. Baltasar Gracián's Oráculo Manual, published in 1647, became the most famous courtier's manual in Europe. Both traveled more widely and were translated more often than any other books of their era. For Chartier they illustrate the great power of translation, which allowed Las Casas' account to be placed in multiple and successive contexts and enabled Gracián's book to take on a range of meanings it had not originally had. Chartier's next two chapters are devoted to plays, one by Lope de Vega, the other by Antônio José da Silva. In the case of Lope's Fuente Ovejuna, the \"translation\" was one from historical chronicle to dramatic performance. In Antônio José da Silva's Vida do Grande D. Quixote, the textual migration is twofold, as Cervantes' hero moves from Spanish to Portuguese and from novel to play.  In an Epilogue, Chartier moves three centuries forward to consider the paradox that it is the absolute immobility of the text, \"reinvented\" word for word, that creates its mobility in Jorge Luis Borges' fiction \"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.\" Works are transformed through changes of genre or language, to be sure; but even when the texts remain fixed, their readers give them different or inverted meaning.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51008089719057,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008094372113,"sku":"NIN9780812253832","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812253833.jpg?v=1763481310"},{"product_id":"knowing-books-book-christina-lupton-9780812243727","title":"Knowing Books","description":"The eighteenth century has long been associated with realism and objective description, modes of representation that deemphasize writing. But in the middle decades of the century, Christina Lupton observes, authors described with surprising candor the material and economic facets of their own texts' production. In Knowing Books Lupton examines a variety of eighteenth-century sources, including sermons, graffiti, philosophical texts, and magazines, which illustrate the range and character of mid-century experiments with words announcing their status as physical objects. Books that \"know\" their own presence on the page and in the reader's hand become, in Lupton's account, tantalizing objects whose entertainment value competes with that of realist narrative.  Knowing Books introduces these mid-eighteenth-century works as part of a long history of self-conscious texts being greeted as fashionable objects. Poststructuralist and Marxist approaches to literature celebrate the consciousness of writing and economic production as belonging to revolutionary understandings of the world, but authors of the period under Lupton's gaze expose the facts of mediation without being revolutionary. On the contrary, their explication of economic and material processes shores up their claim to material autonomy and economic success. Lupton uses media theory and close reading to suggest the desire of eighteenth-century readers to attribute sentience to technologies and objects that entertain them.  Rather than a historical study of print technology, Knowing Books offers a humanist interpretation of the will to cede agency to media. This horizon of theoretical engagement makes Knowing Books at once an account of the least studied decades of the eighteenth century and a work of relevance for those interested in new attitudes toward media in the twenty-first.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51008090210577,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008093028625,"sku":"NIN9780812243727","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812243722.jpg?v=1752315697"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/material-texts-book-series.oembed?page=4","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}