Martyn Lyons’s The Typewriter Century, A Cultural History of Writing Practices takes the machine as a starting point to examine its relationship to work, creative and otherwise and, like Hazzard’s novel, finds a complex network of relationships that it creates or facilitates. This social and literary history is interspersed with reckonings on gender and labour as Lyons considers the technical, personal and even mythical roles that the typewriter played in offices, homes and imaginations for most of the twentieth century.
Tag: material culture
BookLab: Approaches to the Material Text
I am happy to share two syllabi prepared for the graduate level “BookLab” course I teach at the University of Maryland. BookLab itself is dedicated book arts studio and press, co-founded by my colleague Kari Kraus and myself, in a converted seminar room on the same floor that houses the English department. It affords access to four tabletop presses, a collection of metal and wood type, materials for bookbinding and papermaking, a 3D printer, and more, as well as a working collection of several hundred scholarly books about books, experimental artist’s books, chapbooks, and other printed matter.
Jonathan Senchyne. The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature
As the paper codex is becoming increasingly supplemented, if not yet entirely replaced, by digitally mediated textuality, Jonathan Senchyne redirects our attention to the specific sense of materiality that writers and readers experienced as characteristic of literary communication until the late nineteenth century. Rather than focusing on print or publication history as such, however, his monograph The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature sheds light on something that even book historians have often tended to pass over in silence: the reliance of print on paper, the inconspicuous matter on which letters become visible. Over the past fifteen years, several studies have begun to tackle the subject of paper from a range of different perspectives, among them Kevin McLaughlin’s Paperwork: Fiction and Mass Mediacy in the Paper Age (2005), Lisa Gitelman’s Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (2014), or Maryanne Dever’s Paper, Materiality and the Archived Page (2019). What makes Senchyne’s contribution both distinctive and important is his literary-historical approach to reading paper in relation to the nature of its production.
Pandemic Pedagogy: Marginalia in the Marguerite Hicks Collection
Editor’s note: In the spring of 2020, Megan Peiser (Assistant Professor of English at Oakland University) was teaching a capstone…
Caroline Wigginton. In the Neighborhood: Women’s Publication in Early America
Caroline Wigginton. In the Neighborhood: Women’s Publication in Early America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016. 240p., ill. ISBN 9781625342225….