Books in the Material Texts series

The antebellum period has long been identified with the belated emergence of a truly national literature. Restoring a political dimension to accounts of the economic grounds of antebellum literature, this book presents the arguments and struggles that produced an American "culture of reprinting" and held it in place for two crucial decades.

In Won in Translation Roger Chartier considers the mobility of the early modern text and the plurality of circulating versions of the same work. The agent for both is translation, for through their lexical, aesthetic, and cultural decisions, translators always assign new meaning or new status to what they translate.

"Taylor contributes new insights to material philology and makes a brilliant demonstration of its concerns."-Stephen Nichols, The Johns Hopkins University

Knowing Books examines a variety of eighteenth-century sources that deploy language to emphasize their status as physical objects and their circulation as commodities. In Lupton's account, these texts use this device to enhance their appeal as entertaining objects, making them part of an ongoing tradition of self-conscious media.

This book explores actors' systems of intellectual property in early modern England. Focusing on Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, and other plays, James Marino demonstrates how Shakespeare's company asserted ownership of its plays through intense ongoing revision and through insistent attribution to Shakespeare.

"The Pilgrim and the Bee makes a broad claim about a reading-centered history, reclaiming for this purpose a distinctive body of texts. Brown's analysis marks an important step toward a better history of reading."-David D. Hall, Harvard University

Eileen Reeves examines the ways in which a long-standing association of reportage with covert surveillance and astrological prediction was altered by the near simultaneous emergence of weekly newsheets, the invention of the Dutch telescope, and the appearance of Galileo Galilei's astronomical treatise, The Starry Messenger.

Through a wide-ranging examination of antebellum images and literature, The Camera and the Press shows how Americans' first encounter with photography was more textual than visual. This thoroughly illustrated case study reexamines current theories on new media and reconnects print and visual culture in nineteenth-century America.

This book examines one of the most important axes of the book trade in Enlightenment Europe: the circulation of French books between France and German-speaking Europe. The first detailed study of the Franco-German trade, it shows how book dealers mediated the transmission of literature across the frontiers of nation, language, and culture.

Ways of Writing is about the making of texts in seventeenth-century New England, whether they were fashioned into printed books or disseminated in handwritten form. David D. Hall explores issues of authority and authenticity, the roles of intermediaries, and the political and social contexts of publication, among other issues.

Edited by Marta Straznicky, this seminal collection is the first to explore the multiple and intersecting forms of agency exercised by Shakespeare's stationers in the design, production, marketing, and distribution of his printed works.

"Voice in Motion is a book of interdisciplinary reach, solid scholarship, and imaginative resonance."-Bruce Smith, University of Southern California

Were the Romantic poets plagiarists, and did plagiarism have the same meaning two hundred years ago as it has today? Tilar J. Mazzeo offers a major reassessment of the role of borrowing, textual appropriation, and narrative mastery in British Romantic literature and provides a new picture of the period and its central aesthetic contests.

Who owns the tabula picta, the painted tablet? The owner of the tablet? Or to the person who painted it? This meticulous analysis of how medieval jurists responded to these questions is a major a contribution to the history of the proprietary rights to artistic works and to the history of ideas.

The author of the hugely influential The Printing Press as an Agent of Change offers a magisterial and highly readable account of five centuries of ambivalent attitudes toward printing and printers. Once again, she makes a compelling case for the ways in which technological developments and cultural shifts are intimately related.

From his emergence on the German political scene in 1914 and subsequent public infatuation with him, to his fall in 1945 and the growing revulsion as his horrific acts were revealed to the world, Adolf Hitler's visage, Claudia Schmolders argues, was the first political image manufactured for the modern media.

Reading Women brings into conversation the latest scholarship by early modernists and early Americanists on the role of gender in the production and consumption of texts during the expansion of female readership in the early modern period.

In its innovative methodology and its unprecedented attention to the productive interplay of audience and text, The Afterlife of Character, 1726-1825 offers a compelling new approach to eighteenth-century studies, the history of the book, and the very idea of character itself.

A collection of essays from one of the most renowned bibliographical scholars of our time.

The Mind Is a Collection approaches seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theory of the mind from a material point of view, examining the metaphors for mental activity that invoked the material activity of collection.

"A volume that will interest a wide spectrum of readers."-Patrick Geary, University of California, Los Angeles

The essays in this volume discuss the changing purpose of reading from late antiquity to the Renaissance. "A most unusual, fascinating, and rich book, very well written, with copious scholarly notes."-Choice

In Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain leading scholars approach the letter from different disciplinary perspectives to illuminate its workings. Contributors to this volume examine how elements, such as handwriting, seals, ink, and use of space, were vitally significant to how letters communicated.

Based on a survey of early printed books, Used Books describes what readers wrote in and around their books and what we can learn from these marks by using the tools of archaeologists as well as historians and literary critics.

Alberto Manguel examines metaphors of readers and reading from literatures across centuries and the globe, from the ancient epic Gilgamesh to the World Wide Web, from the adventures of Ulysses to the tragedy of Emma Bovary, and he considers how these metaphors reflect the cultures that invent them.

Robert Darnton explores the scandalous literature of libel and the colorful lives of libelers in eighteenth-century France. By doing so he shows how an ideological current eroded authority under the Old Regime and became absorbed in a new, more radical, political culture under Robespierre.

Early African American Print Culture presents seventeen original essays that demonstrate how the study of African American print culture might enrich the study of print culture, while at the same time expanding the terrain of African American literature beyond authorship to editing, illustration, printing, circulation, and reading.