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Explores the Enlightenment in the brutal slave societies of the colonial French and British Caribbean before the Haitian Revolution.
This modern biography provides a comprehensive and balanced view of a legendary figure in American medicine. Controversial because of his fierce fight against women’s rights, S. Weir Mitchell achieved stunning success through his experimentation with venomous snakes, treatment of Civil War soldiers with phantom limbs and burning pain, and creation of the rest cure to treat hysteria and neurasthenia. Mitchell’s life was extraordinary—interesting in its own right and as a case study in the larger inquiry into nineteenth-century medicine and culture.
In The Impossible Craft, Scott Donaldson explores the rocky territory of literary biography, the most difficult that biographers try to navigate. Writers are accustomed to controlling the narrative, and notoriously opposed to allowing intruders on their turf. They make bonfires of their papers, encourage others to destroy correspondence, write their own autobiographies, and appoint family or friends to protect their reputations as official biographers. Thomas Hardy went so far as to compose his own life story to be published after his death, while falsely assigning authorship to his widow. After a brief background sketch of the history of biography from Greco-Roman times to the present, Dona...
Perhaps the single most important founding document of the United States of America, the Declaration of Independence became both a work of art and a mass-market commodity during the nineteenth century. In this book, graphic arts historian John Bidwell traces the fascinating history of Declaration prints and broadsides and reveals the American public’s changing attitudes toward this iconic text. The new and improved intaglio, letterpress, and lithographic printing technologies of the nineteenth century led to increasingly elaborate reproductions of the Declaration. Some were touted as precious relics; others were aimed at the bottom of the market. Rival publishers claimed to have produced t...
This History explores the development of literary culture in Virginia from the founding of Jamestown to the twenty-first century.
Little known today, Lydia Bailey was a leading printer in Philadelphia for decades. Her career began in 1808—when her husband, Robert, died, leaving her with the family business to manage—and ended in 1861, when she retired at the age of eighty-two. During her career, she operated a shop that at its height had more than forty employees, acted as city printer for over thirty years, and produced almost a thousand imprints bearing her name. Not surprisingly, sources reveal that she was closely associated with many of her now better-known contemporaries both in the book trade and beyond, people like her father-in-law, Francis Bailey; Mathew Carey; Philip Freneau; and Harriet Livermore. Throu...
This collection presents fourteen essays on annotating eighteenth-century literature. Authored by editors and annotators of current standard editions—such as California’s Works of John Dryden, the Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, and the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson—this book explores theoretical perspectives on critical editing and the practical work of annotation. Through examples from their own editorial work, the contributors illuminate the personal dilemmas and decisions confronting the annotator of texts: What information in the text needs annotation? When does one stop annotating? How does one manage the annotation-versus-interpretation problem? Br...
In literary investigation all evidence is textual, dependent on preservation in material copies. Copies, however, are vulnerable to inadvertent and purposeful change. In this volume, Peter Shillingsburg explores the implications of this central concept of textual scholarship. Through thirteen essays, Shillingsburg argues that literary study depends on documents, the preservation of works, and textual replication, and he traces how this proposition affects understanding. He explains the consequences of textual knowledge (and ignorance) in teaching, reading, and research—and in the generous impulses behind the digitization of cultural documents. He also examines the ways in which facile assu...
Home to the so-called big five publishers as well as hundreds of smaller presses, renowned literary agents, a vigorous arts scene, and an uncountable number of aspiring and established writers alike, New York City is widely perceived as the publishing capital of the United States and the world. This book traces the origins and early evolution of the city’s rise to literary preeminence. Through five case studies, Steven Carl Smith examines publishing in New York from the post–Revolutionary War period through the Jacksonian era. He discusses the gradual development of local, regional, and national distribution networks, assesses the economic relationships and shared social and cultural pra...