In the early nineteenth century, London publishers dominated the transatlantic book trade. No one felt this more keenly than authors from Ireland, Scotland, and the United States who struggled to ...establish their own national literary traditions while publishing in the English metropolis. Authors such as Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, Walter Scott, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper devised a range of strategies to transcend the national rivalries of the literary field. By writing prefaces and footnotes addressed to a foreign audience, revising texts specifically for London markets, and celebrating national particularity, provincial authors appealed to English readers with idealistic stories of cross-cultural communion. From within the messy and uneven marketplace for books, Joseph Rezek argues, provincial authors sought to exalt and purify literary exchange. In so doing, they helped shape the Romantic-era belief that literature inhabits an autonomous sphere in society.
London and the Making of Provincial Literaturetells an ambitious story about the mutual entanglement of the history of books and the history of aesthetics in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Situated between local literary scenes and a distant cultural capital, enterprising provincial authors and publishers worked to maximize success in London and to burnish their reputations and build their industry at home. Examining the production of books and the circulation of material texts between London and the provincial centers of Dublin, Edinburgh, and Philadelphia, Rezek claims that the publishing vortex of London inspired a dynamic array of economic and aesthetic practices that shaped an era in literary history.
Revisiting The Signifying Monkey in this way admittedly leaves aside a number of interesting topics we might consider upon the publication of the book's twenty-fifth-anniversary edition-namely, its ...role in helping to legitimize the study of African American literature, its controversial deployment of deconstruction in order to do so, and the scholarly allusions and disagree- ments Gates's early writings have inspired since the mid-1980s. ...it also reveals, rather surprisingly, that the curious tension between the black vernacular and the literate white text, between the spoken and the written word, between the oral and the printed forms of literary discourse, has been represented and thematized in black letters at least since slaves and exslaves met the challenge of the Enlightenment to their humanity by literally writing themselves into being through carefully crafted representations in language of the black self.\n As Frances Smith Foster writes, "the visits that astonished and entertained the whites were not without benefit to the slave girl.
The Racialization of Print Rezek, Joseph
American literary history,
09/2020, Letnik:
32, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Abstract
This essay reimagines the centuries-long process through which printed objects in the Anglophone world became powerfully associated with white supremacy and ideologies of racial hierarchy. ...It argues that the racialization of print was not inevitable but contingent, uneven, and always contested; that it continually shifted, varying widely from place to place; and that it occurred in relation to the medium’s changing associations with such other unstable social and ideological categories as class, gender, religion, and nation. The essay proposes two phases for this historical process: the establishment phase, during which the hyperelite medium of the printed codex acquired an association with white authorship in the early modern period; and the essentializing phase, during which, over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a printed book by a single author came to be understood as capable of representing the essential nature of an entire race of people. Samson Occom and Phillis Wheatley wrote during the shift between these two phases of print’s racialization. A comparative case study of Occom’s and Wheatley’s relationships to book publication suggests that early modern social and class hierarchies were more important to their navigation of the medium’s racialized dynamics than is commonly granted.
Beginning where Davidson began, with the so-called first American novel, William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1789), and armed with Catherine Gallagher's field-defining essay, "The Rise of ...Fictionality" (2006), Koenigs does the hard and necessary work of separating, for early Americanists, the genre of the novel from what he calls the multiple "logics of fictionality" of the early national and antebellum periods (18). Tyler's The Algerine Captive, for example, "stages the possibility that certain, disciplined fictions might serve as reliable sources of knowledge about the 'world as it is'" (64). Chapters 4-7 trace additional fascinating developments in fictionality from the 1820s to the 1860s in the context of an exponential growth of novel writing, printing, and reading. Chapter 5 compares Edgar Allan Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) to Robert Montgomery Bird's Shepherd Lee (1838), two radically unconventional fictions that grapple with "a shared question: what is the role of fiction-reading in a print culture where readers are endlessly confronted with dubious and ambiguous claims to truth, veracity, and authenticity?" (190).
Author Rezek, Joseph
Early American studies,
10/2018, Letnik:
16, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The author is not dead, for book historians, but she has been desacralized. From the Latin auctor-one who approves or sanctions, provides evidence or expertise; a prime mover; a progenitor of a race ...or nation; or one who creates a work of art-the English term author came to signify the sole originator of a literary text long after its association with God, the "Author of Nature." Its literary meaning acquired a hallowed, quasi-mythological connotation only after the mutual imbrication of bourgeois individualism, professional authorship, and proprietary copyright in the eighteenth century.
Author REZEK, JOSEPH
Early American studies,
10/2018, Letnik:
16, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
A brief essay exploring the keyword "author" as part of a larger special issue devoted to keywords and catchwords in early American literature and material texts.
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