How to Read a Drawer: Print Culture and Humour Practice in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine

Making Pictorial Print: Media Literacy and Mass Culture in British Magazines 1885–1918

Mary Robinson's essay on the “Present State of the Manners and Society of the Metropolis,” published in the Monthly Magazine in 1800, is read as a significant statement on the status of print culture and the free press at the turn of the nineteenth century. Suggesting that Robinson's “Metropolis” essay may have been an catalyst for (or at the very least an counterargument to) Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. this essay traces one possible genealogy of “Metropolis” and its influence through different periodicals, genres, and even au t h m (in its pirated versions). “Metropolis” is characteristic of Robinson's later prose works in its engagement with radical print culture and its championing of the free press, particularly in reformist periodicals like the Monthly Magazine and newspapers like the Morning Post.

Modernism: Evolution of an Idea by Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers, Modernism’s Print Cultures by Faye Hamill and Mark Hussey, Modernism, Science, and Technology by Mark S. Morrison

Beyond the Flickering Screen: Re-situating e-books

1. Mary Robinson, The Monthly Magazine and the Free Press 2. Correcting Mrs Opie's Powers: The Edinburgh Review of Amelia Opie's Poems (1802) 3. Novel Marriages, Romantic Labor and the Quarterly Press 4. Reading the Rhetoric of Resistance in William Cobbett's Two-Penny Trash 5. May the married be single, and the single happy:: Blackwood's The Maga for the Single Man 6. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and the Construction of Wordsworth's Genius 7. Detaching Lamb's Thoughts 8. The New Monthly Magazine and the Liberalism of the 1820s

"The Rage for Book-Making":Textual Overproduction and the Crisis of Social Knowledge in the Early Republic Matthew Pethers (bio) From the late eighteenth century to the present day, critical accounts of the post-Revolutionary period have often characterized the era as one in which authors were rare and literature was uncommon. In one typical lament from the turn of the nineteenth century, for example, The Monthly Magazine, and American Review (1799–1800) described a litany of factors that were deemed to be holding back American culture: amongst them, inadequate schooling, the lack of financial reward for writers, and a dearth of large-scale printing outlets. "The number of those who write books . . . in our native country, is . . . extremely small," the Monthly noted in an essay "On American Literature" (1799). "That set or class of men, denominated authors, and which is so numerous in the European world, is, on this side of the ocean, so few as scarce to be discernable amidst the armies of merchants, artizans, physicians, advocates, and divines, scattered through the land. Indeed, if an author be defined to be a creature who devotes regular and daily portions of his time to writing that which shall some time be published, I question whether one such creature shall be found among us" (339). Reiterated by the impatient avatars of the American Renaissance, this reading of the literary culture of the early republic was then substantiated in intellectual histories written during the twentieth century. Quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous dictum that "from 1790 to 1820 there was not a book, a speech, a conversation, or a thought" (440) in the state of Massachusetts, Vernon Louis Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought agrees: "The Revolutionary upheaval produced no polite literature in any respects comparable to its utilitarian prose. The expiring . . . literature of England was an exotic that refused to be naturalized, and the times were unpropitious for the creation of a native poetry" (248). And similarly, in From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature, [End Page 573] Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury suggest that "[p]erhaps the most remarkable thing about the American literature of national construction between the Revolution and the 1820s is not its quality, but the fact that any got written at all. . . . There was no clear American aesthetic, no patronage, no developed profession of letters, no certain audience" (61). In short, it seems safe to conclude that the cultural landscape of the early republic is best represented as a barren and sparsely populated terrain. But if we look a little more closely at the literary discourses of the post-Revolutionary period we can discover a perspective that is missing from these accounts: one that emphasizes overabundance rather than scarcity, and excess rather than infertility. In 1807, for instance, The Monthly Anthology and Boston Review (1803–11) carried an essay which complained that "[t]he numerous revolutions and extensive improvements in the various sciences, the facility of multiplying copies of books by the art of printing, the brevity of life, and its necessary duties and avocations, preclude even the most diligent student from the perusal but of a small portion of the innumerable books, daily issuing from the press" ("Silva" 84). Nor was The Monthly Anthology alone in its concern about the large number of publications that appeared to be inundating the new nation. "The art of printing has multiplied books to such a degree that it is a vain attempt either to collect or read all that has been produced," The Port Folio (1801–27) had confirmed a few years earlier: "The volumes of scientifical and literary societies or academies alone are infinite" ("An Author's Evenings" 298). Importantly then, such arguments provide us with an intriguing counternarrative to the tale told by The Monthly Magazine and its successors. Moreover, not only does the rhetoric of overproduction complicate the monological version of post-Revolutionary print culture with which we are usually presented, it also calls into question one of the basic presuppositions of American literary history. Echoing the American Renaissance's own approval of the democratization of writing, critics have invariably assumed that the ongoing expansion of print culture in the post...

From 1831, when he joined the Baltimore household of his aunt Maria Clemm, to his death in 1849, Poe’s life and career were inextricable from the print culture in which he immersed himself. He worked as an editor or assistant for five different periodicals, and throughout his career he sought control of his own monthly magazine, but the closest he came was the brief ownership of a fast-failing weekly, The Broadway Journal. He published ingenious fiction and poetry as well as acerbic reviews and editorial filler, won fame for “The Raven,” and became infamous for his skirmishes with other writers. Meanwhile, he struggled with poverty, alcoholism, and the illness and death of his wife Virginia.

As American literary criticism has shifted to investigate diverse contexts of production and consumption of literary works?what Richard Brodhead calls the history of literature's work ing conditions?the scholarly conversation devoted to periodical pub lication has grown particularly evocative.1 Over the last ten years, scholars have excavated periodical and print culture both to reclaim literary texts overlooked by scholarship and to problematize discus sions of literature's interactions with its cultural and historical sur roundings. As such studies as Michael Lund's America's Continuing Story: an Introduction to Serial Fiction, 1850-1900 (1993), Kenneth Price and Susan Belasco Smith's Periodical Literature in Nineteenth Century America (1995), and Patricia Okker's Social Stories: The Maga zine in Nineteenth-Century America (2003) testify, this scholarly movement seeks to validate periodical literature's importance across an array of scholarly discourses about American literary and cultural experience, and to theorize methods of interpreting periodical litera ture in various material contextual domains. The difficulties of this theoretical endeavor, which Okker describes as a balancing of the co herence and dissonance of different readers' attitudes on one hand, and of diverse materials published in the same periodical on the other, betoken their rewards.2 In striking this balance, scholars can describe with greater accuracy and richness the role of communities in shaping literary form, meaning, and interpretation: as Okker puts it, If read ing a magazine novel in the nineteenth century was comparable to en joying a feast, [. . .] it must have been a very lively feast, marked not just by the slow pacing of many courses, but also by the spirited con versation and debate of the guests.3 In addition, periodical study allows scholars to scrutinize long held critical presumptions about the responsiveness of American liter

Reviewed by: Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1817–1858 by Megan Coyer Terry Barringer (bio) Megan Coyer, Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1817–1858 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), pp. ix + 246, £70 hardcover, £19.99 paperback, open-access e-book. While Megan Coyer's title suggests a wide overview, the subtitle more accurately reflects the scope of her book: a detailed case study of one periodical in a tightly defined period. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Edinburgh was Britain's leading centre of medical education and research. It was also the centre of a thriving, politically contested periodical culture, where the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment, Romanticism, liberalism, political economy, utilitarianism, piety, scepticism, and science jostled and competed to shape the thinking of an intelligent and informed rising middle class. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (originally and briefly called Edinburgh Monthly Magazine) was founded in April 1817. Its leanings were Tory, and with its mixture of reviews, satire, poetry, and fiction, it was envisaged as a combative rival to the Whiggish Quarterly Review. Although its underlying ideology was a compound of Romanticism and high Toryism and its style was controversial and combative, it promoted the values of human feeling and imagination. As Coyer writes, Blackwood's "avowed mission [was] to reunite intellect and feeling in all arenas of social and intellectual life" (126). With plentiful source material in the published volumes and the extensive archive at the National Library of Scotland, Blackwood's Magazine has already been well studied, most notably by David Finkelstein in The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era (2002) and Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition, 1805–1930 (2006). Previous studies have been mostly concerned with the origins and business affairs of the periodical and its role in the literary development of such noted contributors as Thomas De Quincey, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, and Joseph Conrad. Coyer's study, the first to focus on Blackwood's medical content, was long in the making. She attributes the book's genesis to "one of several ideas scribbled in a note-book towards the end of my doctoral studies" (vii). She is currently a lecturer in English literature at the University of Glasgow, with a background in Scottish literature and medical humanities, but her first degree was in neuroscience. Drawing on this dual expertise, she examines the relationship between medical culture and the periodical press by drilling down into the writings, ideas, and careers of Blackwood's medical contributors between 1817, when the journal was established, to 1858, when the Medical Act created the General Medical [End Page 746] Council and consolidated the growing professionalism, status, and regulation of medicine in England and Scotland. Medical themes and representations can be found throughout Blackwood's pages. Coyer makes the case that Blackwood's, in this seminal period, enabled the development of new forms of popular medical writing that remained influential through two succeeding centuries. It also helped construct an idealised figure of a gentlemanly, humane, and literary medical man at a time when the medical establishment was tarnished in the popular mind by association with Burke, Hare, corpse-snatching, and the smells and sights of the dissecting room. Blackwood's was not the first periodical to engage with medical matters, and Coyer's first chapter looks in some detail at the Edinburgh context and its key medical men, especially those associated with the Edinburgh Review, published regularly from 1802. This periodical was noted for its literary criticism and standards of judgement and evaluation in the public domain. It was also popular with medical lecturers, who found that contributing to periodicals gave them increased visibility and a decided advantage in competing for students. Chapter two explores "The Tale of Terror and the 'Medico-Popular.'" Gothic tales of terror were a key genre for a periodical that saw itself as a champion of the invisible world against reductive utilitarian and materialist philosophies. Blackwood's favoured stories of intoxication (Confessions of an English Opium-Eater was originally intended for publication in Blackwood's), sleep, dreaming, phrenology, and deathbeds, often presented...

A question less perilous than how to theorise or model book and print culture, or how to redesign its intellectual frameworks, is to ask about practice. How do scholars actually ‘do’ studies in the history and culture of the book when it comes down to working with sources, adopting methodologies and constructing arguments? How do our chosen source materials and methods shape our (mostly unspoken) definitions of ’book culture’ or ‘print culture’? How do scholars use libraries and archives, and how do they think about the provenance of the collections they hold? If book historians make ambitious claims for the central importance of studying ‘print culture’ and ‘the book’, should they not be able to articulate a methodology and approach to research that is shared across the disciplines of our field, and perhaps also across the broad range of places and times in which the book has appeared? And if they cannot succeed in that ambition, is the failure one of practice, or is it something intrinsic to the very concepts of ‘the book’, ‘book history’ and ‘print culture’?

List of Illustrations Preface Notes on the Contributors 1. The Perils of Print Culture: An Introduction Jason McElligott and Eve Patten 2. The Practice of Book and Print Culture: Sources, Methods, Readings Leslie Howsam 3. 'Pretious treasures made cheap'? The Real Cost of Reading Roman History in Early Modern England Freyja Cox Jensen 4. Early Printed Liturgical Books and the Modern Resources that Describe Them: The Case of the Hereford Breviary, 1505 Matthew Cheung Salisbury 5. 'Lacking Ware, withal': Finding Sir James Ware Among the Many Incarnations of his Histories Mark Williams 6. Balancing Theoretical Models and Local Studies: the Case of William St. Clair and Copyright in Ireland Sarah Crider Arndt 7. The Impact of Print in Ireland, 1680-1800: Problems and Perils T.C. Barnard 8. Signs of the Times? Reading Signatures in Two Late Seventeenth-century Secret Histories Rebecca Bullard 9. Dangerous Detours: The Perils of Victorian Periodicals in the Digitized Age Margery Masterson 10. Nineteenth-century Print on the Move: A Perilous Study of Trans-local Migration and Print Skills Transfer David Finkelstein 11. The Problem with Libraries: The Case of Thomas Marshall's Collection of English Civil War Printed Ephemera Annette Walton 12. The 'Lesser' Durer? Text and Image in Early-modern Broadsheets Cristina Neagu 13. 'Fair forms' and 'withered leaves': Rose Bud and the Peculiarities of Periodical Print Anna Luker Gilding 14.'Print Culture' and the Perils of Practice James Raven Index

In Word or Deed:Practices of Print and Citizenship in the Early U.S. Nathan Jérémie Brink (bio) THE PRACTICE OF CITIZENSHIP: BLACK POLITICS AND PRINT CULTURE IN THE EARLY UNITED STATES. By Derrick R. Spires. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. A LITERATE SOUTH: READING BEFORE EMANCIPATION. By Beth Barton Schweiger. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. The third chapter and seventeenth verse of the book of Colossians encourages its readers that their word and deed must be unified practices of faith. The scripture mentions shared songs and teachings, but also suggests the ethical model of Jesus demands peace and mutual concern overriding the marks of religion, people groups, and states of freedom or bondage. This scripture would be familiar to many of the antebellum urban Black activists and rural White female southern readers explored in new monographs by Derrick R. Spires and Beth Barton Schweiger. Both Spires' The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States and Schweiger's A Literate South: [End Page 7] Reading Before Emancipation consider not only the words their subjects' read or wrote, but rather examine their literary activities as culturally and politically significant practices. For their subjects, word and deed were not distinct categories but enmeshed practices demonstrating what they thought, how they encountered ideas, and the ways they enacted them in the world. However, these books reveal that readers of the nineteenth century did not uniformly interpret what this text's proposition that in Christ there is neither slave nor free meant in their own context. They show the divergence between communities of interpreters, with some who celebrated Black humanity and fostered revolutionary social restructure, and others whose tacit or overt support upheld ideas of white superiority and the institution of slavery in the early United States. In the early nineteenth-century United States, to read, talk about, recite, or share printed material sometimes took on significant civic meaning. Spires and Schweiger each contribute to an expanding field of studies on the practices of literacy and print culture during this period that push the field beyond the literary and print culture of White cosmopolitan elites. The Practice of Citizenship and A Literate South both problematize the view that literary culture was a normative, uniform, or straightforward building block for citizenship and public virtue in the early American republic. Neither relies upon discussion of the public sphere initiated by Michael Warner that serves as a dominant paradigm for understanding the broader subject of literacy and print culture in this period.1 Spires examines the practices and agency of African American thinkers and activists and Schweiger explores the access and agency of rural, mostly White women in Southern states. Each show how their subjects' reading, writing, and participation in print culture represented important cultural and political practices. The Practice of Citizenship was awarded the St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize from the Bibliographical Society of America. It offers an exceptional balance between recovery of under-examined sources and a powerful framework for understanding the significance of Black ideas and practices of citizenship in the early-nineteenth century United States. Spires, an associate professor of English at Cornell University, takes care to recognize literary historians such as Frances Smith Foster, Jocelyn Moody, Carla Peterson, and others, on whose work he builds. In contrast to asking where Black print culture of the nineteenth century fits within theorization of the early American public sphere so commonly considered since Warner's application of Jürgen Habermas' theory, or as creating a what Joanna Brooks has theorized as a Black counterpublic in print, Spires method of "black theorizing" takes Black writers of the nineteenth century at their word.2 Instead of considering how Black ideas of the period fit scholarly paradigms "in a largely white-defined discourse," Spires pays close attention to primary sources, textual details, and social practices of Black writers, preachers, authors, and their communities whose thought and action developed "a practice of citizenship." Spires offers a refreshing suggestion to "base our working definitions of citizenship on black writers' proactive attempts to describe their own political work."3 This method of "black theorizing" in Spires draws upon the [End Page...

Upright PiracyUnderstanding the Lack of Copyright for Journalism in Eighteenth-Century Britain Will Slauter (bio) When and how did written reports of current events—in other words, journalism—become recognized as a form of literary property? In Great Britain, the 1710 Act of Anne provided authors and booksellers with an exclusive right, during a limited period of time, to print, distribute, and sell their books.1 Yet the act made no mention of newspapers or other periodicals, whose status as literary property remained ambiguous well into the nineteenth century. The Literary Copyright Act of 1842 extended protection to “any Encyclopedia, Review, Magazine, Periodical Work, or Work published in a series of Books or Parts,” but disagreement about the legal status of newspapers, not to mention the individual articles they contained, persisted. In the 1830s and 1850s, when the stamp tax on newspapers was lowered and then abolished, the managers of established London dailies feared a flood of cheap papers that would copy news acquired by them at great expense. They lobbied in vain for a special copyright that would prohibit the unauthorized reprinting of news reports for a certain number of hours after initial publication.2 The Copyright Act of 1911 offered explicit protection for newspapers, but by that time copyright was generally understood to cover only the precise language of articles, not the underlying factual details that many publishers now sought to protect.3 Because the Act of Anne did not mention serial publications, and because most court cases and discussions of literary property in the eighteenth century concerned the reprinting of books, it may be tempting to assume that periodical writings simply were not covered by the statute and that writers, publishers, and readers at the time did not view them as literary property in the same way as books.4 Evidence from the register of the Company of Stationers (the official record of copyright during the eighteenth century) and from the periodicals themselves suggests a more complicated story. Rather than simply assuming that contemporaries applied different standards depending upon the material form of publications (bound books versus single [End Page 34] sheets) or the content of those publications (learned treatises versus accounts of recent events), it is necessary to study what they attempted to claim as literary property and how they attempted to do so. In his book Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, Adrian Johns argues convincingly for a broader history of piracy that considers the evolution of moral codes and cultural practices as well as developments in legislation and case law. Johns shows that complaints about piracy predated modern copyright laws, but also that the kinds of activity denounced as piracy have changed over time.5 In the case of eighteenth-century journalism, evidence for contemporary interest in the problem of piracy appears not so much in the formal discussions of literary property usually studied by copyright scholars (petitions to Parliament, court cases, and pamphlets) as in the occasional comments of writers, printers, booksellers, and readers. Such comments tend to be more frequent and more elaborate during periods of increased competition, whether caused by changes in legislation or innovations in publishing practice. This article highlights two such periods: the 1710s, a period of intense competition among the publishers of weekly essay sheets, and the 1730s, when the appearance of monthly magazines led to the first sustained discussion of whether periodical writings could constitute a form of literary property. The debate in the 1730s did not lead to any new legislation, but it did inspire changes in publishing strategy. Moreover, the fact that support for a copyright in journalistic texts was so limited for the rest of the eighteenth century demands explanation. At a time when literary property was the subject of numerous court battles and sustained debate in the press, why did so few people openly discuss a potential copyright in newspaper and magazine writings? What about these writings disqualified them from literary property in eighteenth-century Britain? In order to better understand the ambiguous status of periodical writings under the Act of Anne, it is important to consider the extent to which this act differed from previous regulations and the...

The aim of this article is to read four works from the recent Chilean literary field as a series of reflections on print culture. These novels start from the premise that print has been profoundly affected by the digital revolution. In the first part of the article, I develop a theoretical model to understand the effect of digital on print based on the concepts of remediation, materiality, and practices of print culture. I propose that the digital revolution produced a liberation and tension in the printed culture that the four novels I study reflect, and they do so from the questioning of the functions that print has historically had. Facsímil (2014), El sistema del tacto (2018), Scout and Leñador, are novels aware of their status as a physical object, and therefore use their materiality to reflect, intervene and comment on the role printed book plays in the contemporary world. The article seeks to show that printed culture in Chile is in a moment of paradigmatic change and that literature is an exceptional starting point to understand it.

PurposeThis paper considers the Eurocentric conceptualisation of risk, which reinforces language, culture and business practices that are in conflict with Africa’s own traditional business methodologies. It attempts to identify the rent-seeking methods and resource-seeking strategies that sustain the hegemony of global corporations in Africa.Design/methodology/approachThe paper explores non-linear historical narrative around the concept and construction of the idea and language of risk. It follows discourse analysis to identify how the Eurocentric concept of risk was exported and incorporated within the language of international business in non-Western business traditions. The fundamental research question driving this paper is: To what extent does the conceptualisation of risk perpetuate the African continent as risk-ridden?FindingsThe rent and resource-seeking strategies used by multinational corporations (MNCs) are central to “manufactured” risks, and this negatively creates impact for post-independent Africa. Whilst the state is inconsistent in its approach to dealing with this crisis, global corporations continue to do business, extract resources and expand their capital and market base in Africa.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper, therefore, proposes a further full empirical and theoretical enquiry to examine the nature of manufactured risk from an African perspective on the discursive psychological methodology to investigate how African leaders report on risk as the authors believe that risk theories in the Western-based theories are exaggerated and discursively shaped by their own ideals which do not necessarily apply to the contextual realities in Africa.Practical implicationsIt is imperative for African governments to implement a nationalist-modernising strategy whereby initially the levels of export from local businesses could be proportioned to the levels of MNC resource-seeking activities. This approach would ensure the proliferation of local business groups that could gain access to local and international capital to maximise local production. In this sense, the government would not have to deal with manufactured risk and the challenges that emanate from the flight of capital.Social implicationsThere are political implications for the nation-states, as MNCs use the instabilities and weaknesses of governments on the continent to seek and exploit resources to maintain their competitive advantage at the global level. On the economic implications side, weaker governments cannot have a proper development programme for their countries, thereby perpetuating a cycle of uncertainty and unemployed younger graduates. Instability in economic realms leads to social unrest whereby governments are constantly and fully blamed for the inadequacies in social equality.Originality/valueThe philosophical basis of risk and its historical foundations in the African context are presented. Neo-colonial business methods, languages, cultures and strategies are explored and consideration is given as to how African governments could address the issue of co-option, as well as how to respond to the risks arising by MNCs’ business practices. The paper adds to the theoretical narratives by arguing that when considering entry into the marketplace, MNCs must ensure they integrate African perspectives (native categories) into their operational strategies. Moreover, management practitioners might consider addressing the essential topics of language, culture, business systems and business practices using ethnomethodological lenses.