In the next seven minutes, I would like to convince you that real formalism and real historicism really are, or really should be, one and the same critical practice. Our idea of what counts as knowledge about early English literature will be enriched by integrating formalist and historicist methods. Those of us who work on prosody and poetics are…[Read more]

Quantity matters in the meter of Beowulf and other early English poems. It matters in the form of a metrical principle known as resolution. Metrical resolution served alliterative poets as a way of counting; it can serve modern scholars as evidence for the cultural meanings of verse craft. This paper therefore has two sections: How it Works and…[Read more]

Drawing on Henry Boyd’s 1785 translation of the “Inferno,” this note documents the nature and extent of Coleridge’s knowledge of the “Inferno” and demonstrates that Dante’s work probably did influence Coleridge during the composition of “Kubla Khan.”

The Grimms’ tale of “Brier Rose” (KHM 50) has self-reflexive characteristics of the Romantic literary fairy tale. In thematizing memory and alluding to the imagery used in the preface to the Grimm brothers’ collection of fairy tales, Wilhelm Grimm’s version of the story self-consciously reflects on its own origins and exhibits a self-awareness…[Read more]

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

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.

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]

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]