The historical novel Waking the Dead is now available at ResearchGate. This data file (there are 20) introduces Jane Addams

This essay describes the popular Bechdel Test—a measure of women’s dialogue in films—in terms of social network analysis within fictional narrative. It argues that this form of vernacular criticism arrives at a productive convergence with contemporary academic critical methodologies in surface and postcritical reading practices, on the one hand,…[Read more]

A figure who should be back in our minds these days, British journalist/reformer William T. Stead came to cover the 1893 Chicago world’s fair and wrote If Christ came to Chicago about the “philistines” running the corrupt exploitation of the poor in the town. Some pillars of Chicago society pages and front pews in posh churches paid the tax on…[Read more]

Review Essay on Black Women and 19th-century American Print Culture

This article focuses on William Wells Brown’s 1854 history of the Haitian Revolution.

This article reads the printing and commentary on Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” in Frederick Douglass’ Paper as an act and theorization of translation.

Though already famous, wealthy, and squarely established as a popular chronicler of the early
twentieth century, humorist Ring Lardner’s foray into a serious literary career with Charles Scribner’s
Sons Publishing Company is best characterized as an act of authorial resistance. Rather than evolve into
the “serious” author the firm had hoped f…[Read more]

This article explores the coverage of the 1848 uprisings in Europe by the North Star, a black newspaper edited by Frederick Douglass.

This forum contribution focuses on the racial politics of digitization.

This forum contribution reads Harriet Jacobs’s use of print as a model for contemporary scholarship.

This article explores the illustrations that appeared in the Colored American (1837-1841), a black newspaper published in New York City.

Thoreau’s relation to print culture was complicated and at times contradictory, but from his writing life to his family business, he was shaped by it. Scholars note that he was both successful and a failure as a professional author. He published books and articles made possible by technological changes in papermaking and printing to his west on t…[Read more]

Treats the meaning of the phrase quoted in the title for Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and, especially, “The Bear.” Published in Cambridge UP’s anthology of new essays, Faulkner in Context, edited John Matthews, 2015.

This paper examines textiles as an indicator of social class in the sentimental novels of the American long 1850s. Publications such as Godey’s Lady’s Book (1830) and Lady’s World of Fashion (1842) are credited with creating the ties between social status and textile quality. Yet, domestic novels of the long 1850s such as The Discarded Daugh…[Read more]

Author Dany Laferrière, after a seven year hiatus from writing, produced the book Je suis un écrivain japonais (2008) [I am a Japanese Writer]. The title recalls statements he has frequently made in interviews about how much he hates being pigeon-holed by national or racial labels. The book itself is an examination of what (or who) defines s…[Read more]