Not until the end of the 20th century did scholars begin to look at early African American print culture in the depth it deserves. A story painfully intertwined with the transatlantic slave system and racism, early black print engagement combined, from its beginnings, responses to white aggression and a powerful set of individual and communal desires to read about, record, and, via print, share truths of black life in the United States. Some of the first creators of black print in the United States, from the authors of the earliest slave narratives to poet Phillis Wheatley, had to think through questions of individual and communal identity vis-à-vis emerging American socio-political structures and find ways to ensure control over their own voices in a white-dominated culture that tried to exclude, use, or abuse those voices.
But early black print culture is not simply the story of a single genre like the slave narrative or of exceptional individuals like Wheatley. Rather, it is also the story of organizational print tied to churches, conventions, and activist groups. It is as well the story of a diverse range of modes, from the rich pamphleteering tradition (perhaps most excitingly expressed by David Walker) to early black periodicals like those edited by Samuel Cornish and Philip Bell. Especially after 1830, it also became the story of a range of black women (from Maria Stewart and Jarena Lee to Frances Ellen Watkins Harper), of African Americans across the North (and occasionally in the midst of the slave South), and of an increasing number of formats, genres, and approaches. And it became a story of how black activists might interact (in print and beyond) with white antislavery activists, recognizing both shared and different goals and philosophies as they attempted to fight not only for emancipation but for broader civil rights.
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Early African American Print Culture
Eric Gardner
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Geographic Information Systems and Book History
Fiona A. Black, Jennifer M. Grek Martin, and Bertrum H. MacDonald
Scholars working in the multidisciplinary field of book history pose diverse research questions, work with numerous sources of data and information, and employ a variety of analytical methods and tools. Geographic questions have been considered by book historians, notably since the groundbreaking work of Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin in the 1950s. Geographic information systems (GIS) technology, which was developed in Canada in the 1960s, was initially devised to support new methods of analysis and visualization in the physical and life sciences relating to spatial conditions, patterns, trends, and projections. Since the late 1990s, social scientists have used GIS increasingly, and, since the early 21st century, humanities scholars have also begun to use GIS as a result of digital and spatial turns within their fields. The application of GIS as an analytical method to investigate research questions in book history, first suggested in 1997, is now employed across a range of scholarly endeavors. Examples from the sciences that illustrate the required data structures, as well as the scope and analytical power of GIS, illuminate the development of geographies of the book. Such examples also illustrate the types of questions for which GIS is appropriate for advancing knowledge. Limited training for book historians in the application of GIS, along with the complexities of the technology, have resulted in the need for partnerships with quantitative researchers. These collaborations are increasing understanding of the spatial dimensions of book and print history. In addition, new programs of study in digital humanities, and initiatives of innovative scholarly societies, are helping to forge a generation of technologically trained scholars to propel the field of book history further.
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Spanish Incunabula
Benito Rial Costas
At the end of the 15th century, printed books were known and read throughout Europe, and the modern structure of this new product was defined. However, in many Spanish cities, printing and selling books depended on the work of itinerant printers with scarce economic and technical possibilities and professional skills. The limited industrial, technical, and economic development and the lack of good communications produced a map of Spain with small and dispersed printing offices spread over many different places. Spanish printing quality could not compete with that of other countries. These limitations determined the character of the works that the Spanish printing offices produced. On the one hand, many Spanish printed books were made by and for the local clergy and royal officials, and, in many senses, they followed objectives and productive patterns that were not distant from the purposes of handwritten books. On the other hand, Spanish literature and translations into Spanish and Catalan of important Latin and Italian texts were the other main feature of Spanish 15th-century printing history. The Spanish printing offices could not offer anything to the European book market, and they could not even offer certain books to the Spanish market that booksellers brought from abroad.
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Publishing in Colombia
Diana Paola Guzman and Paula Andrea Marín Colorado
Milestones in the history of publishing in Colombia stretch from a little before the arrival of the printing press in the country to the 21st century with the emergence of dozens of independent publishers. Thus, important events in the history of books, publishing, and reading in Colombia in the 19th century intersect with the influence of numerous civil wars and confrontations between liberals and conservatives. In the 20th century, the figure of the modern editor emerges along with campaigns for the mass production of books. In the 21st century, editorial projects seek to resist against the phenomena of editorial concentration.
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Australian Travel Writing, 1900–1960
Anna Johnston
Travel writing has been an important form through which Australians learned about their own culture and their place in the world. Indigenous cultures of place and travel, geographic distance from the imperial metropole, and a long history of immigration have each made travel a particularly influential cultural practice. Nonfictional prose narratives, based on actual journeys, have enabled travelers in Australia and from Australia abroad to explore what was distinctive and what was shared with other cultures. These are accessible texts that were widely read, and that sought to educate and entertain their audience. The period from the inauguration of the Australian nation in 1901 to 1960, when distance shrank because of technological innovation and new forms of identity gained ascendance, shows the complex ways in which Australians defined their country and its global contribution. Writing about travel to Britain and other European locations helped authors to refine the Anglophone inheritance and a sense that Britain was Home. Northern-hemisphere travels also made some writers intensely feel their national identity. Participation in global conflicts during this period shifted Australian allegiances, both personal and governmental. At the same time, a new tourist industry encouraged Australians to travel at home, in order to learn more about remote areas and the Asia-Pacific region. Travel writing both abroad and at home reveals how particular forms of emotional allegiance and national identity were forged, reinforced, and maintained. This has been a particularly influential genre for a nation based on colonial migration and indigenous displacement, in which travel and mobility have been crucial.
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Rechy, John
Ricardo L. Ortiz
For half of his nearly sixty-year writing career, John Rechy was recognized primarily for his contributions to homosexual literature in the United States, even as from the beginning of that career he consistently cast his major protagonists as young men of mixed ethnicity, part-Mexican and part-Scottish, hailing like him from the border city of El Paso, Texas. As the fields of queer and US Latinx literary studies emerged in the 1980s, critics and scholars began to study the important intersectionalities of Rechy’s multiple identities more explicitly and intentionally, and that attention has been sustained ever since, leading to a significant rethinking of earlier responses to Rechy’s literary work, and a significant opening of the possible viable readerly approaches to Rechy’s entire writing career. Underrepresented in this matrix of critical approaches toward Rechy’s work that favor issues of identity, however, is a more direct, committed interest in describing the specifically literary, and aesthetic, aspects of Rechy’s contributions to the cultural traditions to which he matters, regardless of whether that interest foregrounds or not the understandably compelling factors of identity (ethnic, gender, sexual, class, geographic, etc.) that drive so much extant Rechy criticism. That critical project will surely benefit from a greater attention to, for example, Rechy’s experiments with form, style, and the materiality of print across the six decades of his career, very likely discovering there that those experiments can open alternative doors to understanding not only Rechy’s artistry, but also the unique qualities of his queerness, and the unique qualities of his latinidad.
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Medium
David Trotter
The term “medium” has a long and complicated history. In its most general sense, it originally meant an intermediate agency, instrument, or substance. During the 19th century, it acquired two further common meanings, first as the raw material or mode of expression distinguishing a particular artistic practice, and then, in the sense now prevalent, as a channel of mass communication. For much of its history, literature’s primary medium (or “channel”) has been the printed book, which remains an object of theoretical as well as historical enquiry, often in a comparative context. Since around 1850, the proliferation of technical media—from telegraph and telephone through film, radio, and television to the internet and the mobile phone—has piled comparative context upon comparative context for the study of literature to take into account. From its origins in the 1920s, media theory has tended to reverse engineer an understanding of what a “medium” is and does from its description and analysis of specific material technologies in operation. Its original focus, with film, radio, and television in mind, was on the medium as technical and ideological instrument. However, as material technologies have become ever widespread, sophisticated, and diverse, so their function has begun to resemble that of an intervening agency or substance, rather than that of an instrument.
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African American Literature in the Antebellum Era
Benjamin Fagan
African American literature in the antebellum era encompasses a wide variety of genres and authors. The literature includes poetry, novels, manifestos, slave narratives, and essays. Many of the best-known Black writers of the period, such as Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, and William Wells Brown, were born in southern states and had been enslaved, but a number of other writers, including Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, James McCune Smith, and James Whitfield, were born in the North. Whether or not they had been enslaved, a number of these writers do address questions of slavery and freedom, but African American literature of the era also transcends those categories. In addition to the diverse content of their works, Black writers during the antebellum era worked in and with a variety of print forms including the pamphlet, the book, and the periodical. More than just using different kinds of print as containers for their writings, Black authors theorized the workings of antebellum print culture in ways that inform and enrich current scholarship.
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Reading Culture and Reading in 19th-Century Australia
Susan K. Martin
Reading practices and tastes were transported to colonial Australia along with European colonists. Access to and circulation of books and newspapers in the colonies were subject to the vagaries of distance, travel, and transport, and these had a concomitant impact on reading patterns and access, as well as on the development of local writing and publishing. Trade routes, and the disjunction of inland versus sea routes, may have had some influence on localized reading and distribution. The early history of libraries and booksellers in the Australian colonies, publication patterns, and marketing give clues to reading patterns. Examining the reading accounts and movements of individual readers, and individual texts, provides further detail and context to the environment and situatedness of reading in the Australian colonies, as well as the impact of transport as an idea, and an influence on texts and reading.
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16th- and 17th-Century English Sermons
Katrin Ettenhuber
The continental and English Reformations had a profound impact on the development of the sermon, precipitating a decisive shift from sacramental forms of worship to a Scripture-centered piety. The Henrician Reformation of the 1530s tied preaching to the politics of religion, as the monarch sought to consolidate the Royal Supremacy. The sermon continued to play a crucial role in the promulgation and defense of royal policy for one hundred fifty years, until the Toleration Act of 1689 granted freedom of worship to dissenters and nonconformists. But the pulpit was equally important as a forum in which foreign and domestic affairs could be subjected to scrutiny and criticism, in often fraught and complex attempts to fulfill the Christian mandate to speak truth to power. Preaching did not simply reflect or articulate public opinion, but actively contributed to its formation.
The early modern sermon, especially when it was delivered at large and popular venues such as Paul’s Cross or Saint Paul’s Cathedral, was not merely an occasion for the formal exposition of Scripture but a major social event that attracted significant numbers of spectators and listeners. Preachers were keenly attuned to the demands of homiletic decorum: if a sermon was to reach the hearts and souls of the audience, it needed to adapt to the time, place, and circumstances of performance. Places of preaching reflected the primacy of decorum in their architectural layout: the chapels royal embodied the idea of royal supremacy by seating the monarch in an elevated royal closet, for instance. Sermons were preached in a wide range of settings: parish churches and cathedrals; chapels at the Inns of Court and the universities; outdoor pulpits and private meeting houses; and before Parliament and on the judicial circuit. And they existed in a variety of forms and media: in their original performance context, animated by voice and gesture; as manuscript notes, summaries, or illicit copies for further circulation; and in printed formats ranging from expensive folios to penny chapbooks. These different modes of transmission were in turn associated with different architectures of cognition: print culture helped preserve a sermon’s message, but at the cost of sacrificing the spiritual bond with the congregation. In a culture that saw the sermon as the primary means of communication with God, and therefore as the main path to salvation, retaining a connection with the living tradition of apostolic preaching was vital, and preachers sought to augment their printed sermons with features of orality and dialogue in order to compensate for the absence of an immediate rapport with the audience.
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Vernacular Arabic Literature in Tunisia in the 19th through 21st Centuries
Benjamin Koerber
Although vernacular varieties of Arabic—the so-called dialects—have been used in oral performance genres for centuries, they have held a much more restricted presence in written literature, which has traditionally been regarded as the exclusive domain of classical or standard Arabic (al-ʿarabīyah al-fuṣḥá). In contrast with the vernacular Arabic literatures of Egypt, Morocco, and the Levant, those of Tunisia have been scantly regarded by scholars. The first significant corpus of written texts in the vernacular Arabic of Tunisia emerged in the late-19th century, in Hebrew characters. This “Judeo-Arabic” literature was born of the intersecting currents of the Haskalah or Jewish “Enlightenment,” the Arab Nahḍah or “Renaissance,” and French literary culture, as well as trans-Mediterranean networks of trade and print technology. Although a significant portion of Tunisian Judeo-Arabic literature consisted of translations and adaptations from Hebrew, classical Arabic, and French, it also included many original works, especially in journalism and poetry. This vernacular literature, however, would decline under the impact of French colonialism and Zionism, before ceasing entirely by the 1960s. Meanwhile, a separate, but not entirely disconnected, series of vernacular literary experiments began to take shape in Arabic script at the beginning of the 20th century. From 1908, the satirical press emerged as the most significant medium for the publication of vernacular texts, which proliferated in response to the cultural, linguistic, and political changes brought by French colonialism. Printed folklore collections would constitute a second major venture in the writing down of vernacular Arabic, and became a means by which both French colonial administrators and Tunisian intellectuals “imagined” the Tunisian “nation.” The vernacular written in Arabic script would eventually find its way into short stories, novels, comics, cultural and political journalism, and internet writing. The expansion of vernacular writings in the 21st century corresponds to increasing economic and political liberalization, the foundation of organizations for the promotion of the vernacular, and new opportunities for publishing both in print and online.
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Print Culture and Literature in 19th-Century Brazil
Ana Utsch
The history of Brazilian print culture is closely connected to the establishment of national literature in the 19th century. Indeed, after three centuries of prohibition of printing activity in the colony by the Portuguese Crown, Impresão Régia, the first legal printing establishment in Brazil, was created in 1808 due to the arrival of the Portuguese royal family during the Napoleonic wars. From the late implementation of Imprensa Régia, which became Typographia Nacional after the independence of Brazil in 1822, to the consolidation of the publishing world in the second half of the century, marked by the controversial French presence, the discourses on literature and print production modes tend to reflect the different circulation spheres. In fact, following the long period of colonization under Portuguese rule, print production modes were implemented simultaneously with the consolidation of a broad print culture, characterized by the growth of newspapers, the circulation of images, and the impactful arrival of the novel. Undeniably, the sudden and concurrent arrival of the two worlds—technical and cultural—in addition to the paradoxical development of the print world, marked by its two technical systems—artisanal and industrial—strongly influenced the material aspects of 19th-century Brazilian publishing production. In this context, under the argument of an alleged precariousness of local print production, writers, critics, typographers, engravers, and bookbinders created literary and editorial polemics in newspapers, magazines, and books that contributed to the very construction of a “literary system.” Despite the intrinsic relationships established between literature and publishing, the multidisciplinary field of the history of the book insists on separating approaches dedicated to the technical production processes and the material analysis of objects of written culture from the approaches dedicated to print circulation and uses. Understanding the contradictions imposed by the simultaneous implementation of two technical systems, which are found when analyzing the traces left by the print equipment supply trade and the conditions to build a printing workshop, contributes to understanding the historical conditions of print production. In this sense, the historiographical perspective dialogues with heritage studies in the notion of printing heritage, understood in its tangible and intangible dimensions, considering the machines and tools of the past, together with the techniques then in use. In fact, while bringing together a set of material, technical, and mechanical elements of different production modes, printing heritage also contains the memories of the human actions that set them in motion.
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Black Arts Publishing and the Politics of Design
Kinohi Nishikawa
The Black Arts movement heralded an important turn in the history of African American literature. Between 1965 and 1975, a loose confederation of African American poets, playwrights, artists, and intellectuals set out to remake the world in their own image. Fed up with what they considered to be the oppressive logic of Euro-American cultural standards, these practitioners theorized and executed a program of black aesthetic self-determination. Contemporary critics followed suit, emphasizing Black Arts’ conjoined investments in nationalist politics and radical poetics—the discursive level at which the movement reshaped African American letters. That remained the dominant way of understanding the movement until the early 21st century, when scholars began examining Black Arts’ publishing networks and institutions, or the material conditions for creative expression. Since then, scholars have shown how the movement’s effort to redefine the black voice was achieved through a concomitant effort to redesign the black text. Their research has pointed to the need for historicizing the politics of design in this moment of literary transformation. For Black Arts publishers, the work of photographers, illustrators, and graphic designers was important not only for bringing specific literary texts to life but for inviting everyday readers into a robust, race-affirming literary culture.
