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Handwriting in Early America
A Media History
Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book
Edited by Mark Alan Mattes
Published by: University of Massachusetts Press
300 Pages, 6.00 x 9.00 x 1.00 in, 18
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As digital communication has become dominant, commentators have declared that handwriting is a thing of the past, a relic of an earlier age. This volume of original essays makes it clear that anxiety around handwriting has existed for centuries and explores writing practices from a variety of interdisciplinary fields, including manuscript studies, Native American studies, media history, African American studies, book history, bibliography, textual studies, and archive theory.
By examining how a culturally diverse set of people grappled with handwriting in their own time and weathered shifting relationships to it, Handwriting in Early America uncovers perspectives that are multiethnic and multiracial, transatlantic and hemispheric, colonial and Indigenous, multilingual and illiterate. Essays describe a future of handwriting as envisioned by practitioners, teachers, and even government officials of this time, revealing the tension between the anxiety of loss and the need to allow for variations going forward.
Contributors include James Berkey, Blake Bronson-Bartlett, John J. Garcia, Desirée Henderson, Frank Kelderman, Michelle Levy, Lisa Maruca, Christen Mucher, Alan Niles, Seth Perlow, Carla L. Peterson, Sarah Robbins, Patricia Jane Roylance, and Danielle Skeehan.
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Copybooks and the Rescripting of Cultural Values
Karen Sánchez-Eppler
Introduction
Toward a Media History of Handwriting in Early America
Mark Alan Mattes
Part I: Handwriting and the Idea of Writing
Chapter 1
Feathers and Quills
New World Beasts and the Natural History of Handwriting
Danielle Skeehan
Chapter 2
“Vive la Plume!”
The Pleasures and Problems of Handwriting Pedagogy in the Long Eighteenth Century
Lisa Maruca
Chapter 3
Print Hand
Class, Literacy, and the Mechanization of Writing
Patricia Jane Roylance
Chapter 4
Of Graphology as a Possible Science
Edgar Allan Poe’s Handwriting Analysis
Seth Perlow
Chapter 5
The Mark of Chickwallop
Christen Mucher
Part II: Handwritten Genres
Chapter 6
Abigail Adams, Letter Writing, and the Gender Politics of History
Mark Alan Mattes
Chapter 7
Doing Things with Diaries
Handwritten Genres in Early American Fiction
Desirée Henderson
Chapter 8
Handwriting and the Cultivation of Taste
Lines Copied into an African American Schoolgirl’s Friendship Album, Philadelphia, 1840
Carla L. Peterson
Chapter 9
“Imitation of Print”
Handwritten Performances and Intermedial Survival in Civil War Prison Newspapers
James Berkey
Chapter 10
Rites of Encouragement
Cultivating Indian Reform in Susette La Flesche’s Friendship Album
Frank Kelderman
Part III: Scribal Time
Chapter 11
Graphite Time
Blake Bronson-Bartlett
Chapter 12
Revising a Narrative of Mental Illness
The Overwritten Diary of a Nineteenth-Century Mental Patient
John J. Garcia
Chapter 13
Claiming Bradstreet’s Hand
The Andover Manuscript in Critical History
Alan Niles
Chapter 14
Matter over Mind
Reading The Bondwoman’s Narrative in Print and Manuscript
Sarah Robbins
Chapter 15
William Upcott’s Autographic Mania
Michelle Levy
Afterword
Christopher Hager
Contributors
Index
MARK ALAN MATTES is assistant professor of English at the University of Louisville.
“Mattes suggests that we can come to grips with what writing is by triangulating between inscription, the people inscribing, and the systems of communication in which their inscriptions circulated. The 16 essays in the collection bear out the expansive potentials of this framework, not only by truly taking on the contingency of writing itself but also by revealing how the same kinds of writing can do radically different cultural work.”—Sonja Drimmer, Public Books
“This is an exciting collection. To see handwriting as a kind of media—and to understand that media form as intersectional—is a major and most welcome shift in how scholars understand the material texts of early America and is crucially important for the field moving forward.”—Megan Walsh, author of The Portrait and the Book: Illustration and Literary Culture in Early America“This new collection is a key intervention in literary studies. Its essays vary from the most canonical writers (Bradstreet, Poe, Emerson) to more obscure figures whose texts inform the ways scholars understand writing, textuality, and intermediality.”—Hilary E. Wyss, author of English Letters and Indian Literacies: Reading, Writing, and New England Missionary Schools, 1750–1830
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