Browsing by Subject "History of the book"

This dissertation traces the evolution of Whitman's democratic thinking across the first four editions of Leaves of Grass, covering the auspicious years 1855, 1856, 1860 and 1867. While democracy is the master political term within Whitman's later editions, it was nearly devoid from the original one, in which republican political concepts were still regnant. The argument put forth is that in the space of twelve years, Whitman's relationship to democracy went through a strikingly classic dialectic trajectory: emergence, consolidation and fissure. The immediate engine driving this progression was the Civil War, but behind this immediate cause was the slower, broader motor of modernization, particularly modernization's expansion of markets, for in the market's circulation and interconnection of people and commodities Whitman saw a model for an expansive and integrative democratic collectivity. The first chapter explores the importance to Whitman of the physical print room as a uniquely hybrid site in the course of modernization, for while it was one of the first to exploit the expanding industrial market, it also maintained pre-industrial forms of artisanal labor late into that progression. The print room thus became a site where the industrial market's reach and pre-industrial labor's affective relationship to the product and its consumers could be combined, and the print room therefore plays a central role, in ways both subtle and profound, in Whitman's poetry, in his understanding of the emerging democratic nation, and in his own literary productive practice. The second chapter turns from an investigation of democratic social space to an investigation of democratic time, noting how a nearly forgotten event, a loan between Whitman and James Parton, ended the "afflatus" under which the early editions were produced and prompted Whitman to revamp Leaves' relationship to history. Whitman's experience of personal debt failure led him to reconsider the ways in which his political project was susceptible to similar collapse, for the circuits of affective connection upon which his democratic project was based depended not only on their reach through space but on their forward projection through time, particularly the continual recycling of death into life, what Whitman called the "perpetual payment of the perpetual loan." Whitman sought to reduce this contingency by abstracting the political project of the work from his immediate social world (America) to a political philosophy (democracy) which stood above and outside of time. The 1860 edition thus marked the emergence of democracy as the book's central political philosophy. Yet this strategy proved insufficient when Whitman confronted the one barrier to affective exchange that his verse could not bridge: the dead bodies of the Union soldiers. This unbridgeable difference reverberated outward through the circuits of Whitman's poetry, dismantling the political and affective structures he had been building up to 1860. A text which previously declared the absence of both the past and death - "the greatest poet ... places himself where the future becomes present," "the smallest sprout shows there is really no death" - now becomes doubly haunted by ghosts, once by the dead bodies of Union soldiers which, as much as Whitman declares he "will henceforth forget," he cannot, and again by the strange emergence of new "Phantoms, gigantic, superb." These phantoms represent for Whitman the inversion of democracy's promise, democracy become nightmarish and zombie-like, and his fundamental triangle is haunted by its inverse: a melancholic Whitman; the overmastering re-emergence of the "bards of the past" and explicitly antiquated poetic forms; and a threatening, sovereign federal power autonomous from the people. The revisions Whitman introduced to the post-war edition of 1867 tell the story of a crisis in democratic confidence on behalf of democracy's former champion. Taken all together, the first four editions of Leaves form a chronicle of the archetypal democratic poet's struggle with democracy during U.S. democracy's most critical decade.

This study locates a medieval poetics of lineation in the manuscript and early print reception of fifteenth-century Middle English penitential poems. I investigate three exemplary poems of penitential devotion alongside modern theories of the poetic line, combining approaches from cultural studies, reception theory, and material poetics to show how the poetic line shaped medieval readers’ perception of reality and orientation within social networks. When played to full effect, the poetic line, I contend, is like light: both particle (complete in itself) and wave (moving toward transfer). In Lines of Relation I argue that the energetic shimmer of the poetic line presented medieval readers with a way to face their own limits as well as their ongoing responsibilities to and for others.

In my introduction chapter, I excavate Middle English discourses of line and relation in the context of penitential practice and the explosive vernacularization of Latin writings in late medieval England. I then draw on my archival research of devotional poems in fifteenth-century manuscripts and early print books to analyze the linear workings of three poems for penitential introspection and ethical sensitization: John Lydgate’s Kalendare (which I discuss in chapter 2), Thomas Brampton’s Penitential Psalm paraphrase (chapter 3), and the anonymous Passion complaint “Wyth scharpe thornes,” (chapter 4). These are rhyming Middle English prayers, psalms, and meditations that were popular enough to appear, collectively, in in approximately thirty surviving late medieval English books. Rather than viewing these texts as mere scripts or instructional aids, we can understand them first and foremost as poems inviting active interpretive engagement on the part of the reader. What unites these texts under the banner of penitential labor, I show, is their use of the poetic line as a form prompting readers to explore, at once, personal limit and limitless social responsibility. As I argue in the Coda, these considerations of line, limit, and conscience continue in poems by present-day writers of color in the United States. Like the poetic forms of penance in the medieval texts I examine, poems by Lucille Clifton and Thomas Sayers Ellis entangle the reader in linear interactions that insist on literary reception as a site for moral awareness and action.

Lines of Relation aims to increase appreciation for the basic scope for conceptual, expressive, and ethical work that medieval poetic forms made available to their audiences—and as a result to enrich and refine responses to the ethical demands these forms’ continuance make in literary reception today.

"Reading the Street" chronicles the rise of black pulp fiction in the post-civil rights era from the perspective of its urban readership. Black pulp fiction was originally published in the late 1960s and early 1970s; it consisted of paperback novels about tough male characters navigating the pitfalls of urban life. These novels appealed mainly to inner-city readers who felt left out of civil rights' and Black Power's promises of social equality. Despite the historic achievements of the civil rights movement, entrenched structural inequalities led to America's ghettos becoming sites of concentrated poverty, rampant unemployment, and violent crime. While mainstream society seemed to turn a blind eye to how these problems were destroying inner-city communities, readers turned to black pulp fiction for the imaginative resources that would help them reflect on their social reality. In black pulp fiction, readers found confirmation that America was not on the path toward extending equal opportunities to its most vulnerable citizens, or that the rise of Black Power signaled a change in their fortunes. Yet in black pulp fiction readers also found confirmation that their lives as marginalized subjects possessed a value of its own, and that their day-to-day struggles opened up new ways of "being black" amid the blight of the inner city.

This dissertation answers the question, “How were scribes in the ancient world trained?” The following social history elevates the marginalized voices of ancient scribes, emphasizing their personhood and their agency as human individuals. Chapter 1 establishes the scope of the thesis along with the evidence used and the methodologies employed to approach this evidence. Chapter 2 examines the social backgrounds of ancient Mediterranean scribes, using documentary archives, apprenticeship contracts, and funerary inscriptions to glimpse into their lives and their training. Chapter 3 draws from papyrological evidence to reconstruct the “curriculum” scribes used to develop professional scripts for copying books and writing documents. Chapter 4 details how scribes mastered scribal tools and techniques, balancing ancient archaeological evidence alongside the specialized artisan knowledge preserved by well-attested scribal traditions. This synthesis of evidence focuses on the lived experiences of the creators of our physical texts, thereby uncovering previously unexplored realities about how these texts were written and read.