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.

Over the course of his career Ernest Hemingway wrote introductions for a number of writers. These pieces have been largely forgotten, but study and analysis of Hemingway’s introductions offers additional insight into the well-known author. The process of creating and marketing these pieces allowed Hemingway to manipulate and refine his public p…[Read more]

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]

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]

Emphasizing the peculiar, the perverse, the clandestine and the scandalous, this volume opens up a critical discourse on sexuality and visual culture in early modern Italy. Contributors consider not just painted (conventional) representations of sexual activities and eroticized bodies, but also images from print media, drawings, sculpted objects…[Read more]

Questo volume propone un discorso critico sulla sessualità e sulla cultura visiva dell’Italia rinascimentale. I saggi raccolti tentano di fare luce su una serie di zone d’ombra, dando spazio a tutte quelle pratiche o preferenze considerate in genere come alternative o anomalie, e a un’ampia varietà di scenari “scandalosi”. Particolare attenzione…[Read more]

This paper explores the extent to which whiteness is represented in the Fall 2016 issue of Brevity. I suggest that the authors’ representation of whiteness manifests in the forms of both white privilege and white supremacy, and thus serves as the predominant theme of this issue of the magazine. I also consider the ways in which distant reading 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]

This paper revises book history’s historiography to account for feminist inquiry.

Although we have long discussed the rise of consumer culture and the increase of print in Restoration England (see Birth of a Consumer Society, 1982), comparatively little information exists on specific methods publishers used to advertise to audiences and what role they played in creating new markets. My project fills this gap by examining…[Read more]

This essay analyzes the illustration sequences of the four magnificent Gospel books made for Judith of Flanders within the context of the political chaos in pre-Conquest England. These deluxe display books indicate one of the ways that literacy and literary patronage provided cultural legitimacy and social status for secular women in the late…[Read more]

In late 1991, an editor at the Sunday New York Times Book Review asked me to write a feature article about that uniquely American genre, the Indian captivity narrative. When the editor called, I was dean of the College of Humanities at the University of Arizona. I accepted the Times assignment in hopes that writing this article might prove a…[Read more]

In late 1991, an editor at the Sunday New York Times Book Review asked me to write a feature article about that uniquely American genre, the Indian captivity narrative. When the editor called, I was dean of the College of Humanities at the University of Arizona. I accepted the Times assignment in hopes that writing this article might prove a…[Read more]