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Jane Austen's ironic reference to 'the trash with which the press now groans' is only one of innumerable Romantic complaints about fiction's newly overwhelming presence. This book draws on evidence from over one hundred Romantic novels to explore the changes in publishing, reviewing, reading, and writing that accompanied the unprecedented growth in novel publication during the Romantic period. With particular focus on the infamous Minerva Press, the most prolific fiction-producer of the age, Hannah Hudson puts its popular authors in dialogue with writers such as Walter Scott, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth, and William Godwin. Using paratextual materials including reviews, advertisements, an...
"Long Before the Establishment of public libraries in America, during the Colonial period and the early decades of the new Republic, thousands of "social" or membership libraries served as the primary venues for the circulation of books. This collection of sixteen essays represents the first attempt to provide, through individual histories of the largest surviving membership libraries, a composite portrait of this important movement in American library history. Although they sport different names - society library, library society, mercantile library, mechanics' institute, athenaeum - all of these institutions have played a significant role in the intellectual and cultural lives of their communities, which range from Boston, New York, and Charleston to Cincinnati, San Francisco, and La Jolla. Some continue to serve as the central library in their city, whereas others resemble large, independent research institutions. Each chapter in this book is intended to stand alone, and yet collectively these essays should suggest the evolution of a particular kind of American library during the past three centuries."--BOOK JACKET.
The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century traces the major transformation of newspapers from a politically based press to a commercially based press in the nineteenth century. Gerald J. Baldasty argues that broad changes in American society, the national economy, and the newspaper industry brought about this dramatic shift. Increasingly in the nineteenth century, news became a commodity valued more for its profitablility than for its role in informing or persuading the public on political issues. Newspapers started out as highly partisan adjuncts of political parties. As advertisers replaced political parties as the chief financial support of the press, they influenced newspape...