New Directions in Print Culture Studies - by Jesse W Schwartz & Daniel Worden Hardcover

Book Synopsis

New Directions in Print Culture Studiesfeatures new methods and approaches to cultural and literary history that draw on periodicals, print culture, and material culture, thus revising and rewriting what we think we know about the aesthetic, cultural, and social history of transnational America.

The unifying questions posed and answered in this book are methodological: How can we make material, archival objects meaningful? How can we engage and contest dominant conceptions of aesthetic, historical, and literary periods? How can we present archival material in ways that make it accessible to other scholars and students? What theoretical commitments does a focus on material objects entail?

New Directions in Print Culture Studiesbrings together leading scholars to address the methodological, historical, and theoretical commitments that emerge from studying how periodicals, books, images, and ideas circulated from the 19th century to the present. Reaching beyond national boundaries, the essays in this book focus on the different materials and archives we can use to rewrite literary history in ways that highlight not a canon of "major" literary works, but instead the networks, dialogues, and tensions that define print cultures in various moments and movements.

Review Quotes

New Directions in Print Culture Studiesdelivers on the promise to make its reader see the field anew. This volume's illuminating case studies are deeply researched and theoretically sophisticated, intellectually honest and, at moments, delightfully weird. A wonderful overview for seasoned and curious scholars alike.

Jordan Alexander Stein, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Fordham University, USA

An indispensable guide, New Directions in Print Culture Studiesgathers 16 case studies that feature inventive enactments of and critical reflections on the methodologies that have enabled this radically interdisciplinary mode of analysis to transform scholarly production across the humanities and social sciences.

Donald E. Pease, Ted & Helen Geisel Professor of the Humanities, Dartmouth College, USA

This rich collection both argues for and amply demonstrates the centrality of print culture to scholarship and pedagogy in the 21st century. In this volume, Schwartz and Worden give us an edgily political, unabashedly nerdy, and theoretically capacious conception of what print culture studies is and can be. The engaging and provocative essays found therein take up objects of inquiry from cartes de visites to bullet journals, from story papers to multimodal websites. They consider capitalism and counterpublics, comics and collections, sound and medium, celebrity and canonicity, multilingualism and hemispheric studies, pedagogy and activism. The clarity and precision of the chapters make this collection classroom-ready. These provocations will also serve as inspirations and entry points for scholars in the field hungry for just such an invitation to connect the print artifacts of the past in all their formal and material specificity to the urgent matters of the present. These "new directions" are awfully fun to explore.

Catherine Keyser, Professor of English, University of South Carolina, USA

About the Author

Jesse W. Schwartz is Associate Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, USA.

Daniel Worden is Associate Professor of Art at the Rochester Institute of Technology, USA.