Eliza Haywood was one of the most popular and prolific writers of the early eighteenth century, and in the 1720s, her output alone accounted for a significant percentage of all writing being published in English by women. Until the late twentieth century, her large and influential body of work was largely ignored by critics and excluded from the current eighteenth-century cannon. Haywoods body of work is immense, and much remains to be done to fully illuminate her involvement in early modern literature. My study focuses on Haywoods very early career, 1719 1726. My goal is to examine how Haywood achieved her early success in an industry that was relatively inhospitable to women, and what reaction her texts garnered from the marketplace, and the reading public.<p>Part One: The Marketplace, focuses on the construction of Haywoods early career in the context of early eighteenth-century print culture. I investigate the cultural reception and influence of Haywood as author within her social milieu. Haywoods writing emerged from a period when women were beginning to write in large numbers; Haywood was one of the first, the most popular, and the most prolific women writers of the eighteenth century. She achieved a high profile presence in the marketplace and became an example that womens writing could be a lucrative product.<p>Part Two: The Works explores the subject material of Haywoods popular early novels; I argue these works not only function as entertaining amatory fiction, but also contain meritorious social criticism and even possess a didactic tone previously exclusively associated with her later work. While her writing often contests the status quo, it also sometimes replicates it. She simultaneously affirms yet challenges mainstream culture.<p>Overall, this dissertation aims to explore and demystify the complexities, tensions, and contradictions involved in Haywoods writing, and Haywood as a cultural figure. We can only achieve a full understanding of the cultural influence of her texts and career by considering the content of her work alongside the marketability she achieved. Additionally, by exploring Haywoods work during her early career, I hope to contribute to a broader, more accurate understanding of Haywoods body of work as a whole.

“On the Margins: Steady Sellers and the Problem of Inequality in Nineteenth-Century America,” reimagines the trans-Atlantic history of the novel by attending to the importance of cheaply printed canonical books. I demonstrate that some of the most lasting “steady sellers” in literary history—John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote —owe their fame and endurance to cheap trans-Atlantic abridgments and the poor, Black, female, juvenile and otherwise marginalized readers whose growing demand kept them steadily in print. From chapbook abridgments of Robinson Crusoe pitched to working class readers, to toy book adaptations of The Pilgrim’s Progress for young girls, to illustrated, third-person, single volume adaptations of Pamela that subtly reorient the narrative toward questions of interracial sexual violence, and Jacksonian-era political cartoons satirizing Don Quixote, examples and invocations of these stories in early U.S. print culture suggest that the novel’s literary and material coherence was being vigorously renegotiated against the backdrop of an increasingly diverse print marketplace. We see this conflict most clearly in many of the defining American literary works of the nineteenth-century, including Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World(1850), Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884). Each of these works dramatizes the divergent interpretations present in the print histories of steady sellers in ways that center the experiences of marginalized readers. In bringing together the uneven circulation histories of steady sellers and the formation of U.S. literary culture, this project aims to challenge critical orthodoxies about the rise of the novel and acknowledge the vital role that poor, female, Black, and juvenile readers played in the formation, negotiation, and contestation of literary canons. / 2024-11-03T00:00:00Z

<p>This dissertation examines Mexico City’s material politics of print—the central actors engaged in making print, their activities and relationships, and the legal, business, and social dimensions of production—across the nineteenth century. Inside urban printshops, a socially diverse group of men ranging from manual laborers to educated editors collaborated to make the printed items that fueled political debates and partisan struggles in the new republic. By investigating how print was produced, regulated, and consumed, this dissertation argues that printers shaped some of the most pressing conflicts that marked Mexico’s first formative century: over freedom of expression, the role of religion in government, and the emergence of liberalism. Printers shaped debates not only because they issued texts that fueled elite politics but precisely because they operated at the nexus where new liberal guarantees like freedom of the press and intellectual property intersected with politics and patronage, the regulatory efforts of the emerging state, and the harsh realities of a post-colonial economy.</p><p>Historians of Mexico have typically approached print as a vehicle for texts written by elites, which they argue contributed to the development of a national public sphere or print culture in spite of low literacy levels. By shifting the focus to print’s production, my work instead reveals that a range of urban residents—from prominent printshop owners to government ministers to street vendors—produced, engaged, and deployed printed items in contests unfolding in the urban environment. As print increasingly functioned as a political weapon in the decades after independence, print production itself became an arena in struggles over the emerging contours of politics and state formation, even as printing technologies remained relatively unchanged over time.</p><p>This work examines previously unexplored archival documents, including official correspondence, legal cases, business transactions, and printshop labor records, to shed new light on Mexico City printers’ interactions with the emerging national government, and reveal the degree to which heated ideological debates emerged intertwined with the most basic concerns over the tangible practices of print. By delving into the rich social and cultural world of printing—described by intellectuals and workers alike in memoirs, fiction, caricatures and periodicals— it also considers how printers’ particular status straddling elite and working worlds led them to challenge boundaries drawn by elites that separated manual and intellectual labors. Finally, this study engages the full range of printed documents made in Mexico City printshops not just as texts but also as objects with particular visual and material qualities whose uses and meanings were shaped not only by emergent republicanism but also by powerful colonial legacies that generated ambivalent attitudes towards print’s transformative power.</p> / Dissertation

In recent years a number of important studies have emerged that focus on the lives of the human agents who operated in the early-modern book trade. This marks a scholarly shift away from the technologies of book production towards the figures who operated, profited from, and helped to shape, print technologies and their related products. In this critical movement the identities of printers, publishers, and booksellers have come to matter, both in terms of our understanding of what constitutes ‘print culture,’ and in efforts to narrativise the history of the book. However, although scholars have become increasingly familiar with a critical vocabulary that links early-modern print with textual transience, and the archive with paradigms associated with absence, disputation, and authenticity, biographies related to the lives of book-trade professionals have tended to privilege the representational stability of the documentary evidence we use to reconstruct past lives. This thesis aims to address this critical vacuum by analysing the life and career of one highly controversial, although critically neglected, 17th-century printer, Henry Hills (c. 1625-1688/9). By drawing together methodologies associated with bibliography, the history of the book, and the study of literatures, the thesis seeks to self-reflexively respond to the absences, doublings, missing or fabricated texts, revisions, accretions, and amendments that seem to mark, and have come to shape, the story of Hills’ life. Theories and approaches associated with the materiality of early-modern lives, critical biography, and the archive are used to fully explore the way Hills functioned both in his own time and after as a metonymic figure who has been actively written and rewritten with different historically specific agendas in mind. Ideas of elusiveness, how his contemporaries struggled to represent Hills, and the problem of locating him in the documentary evidence, are also investigated. In the process this thesis casts new light not only on Hills but on the 17th-century printing trade and the printer as a cultural emblem, 17th-century history and culture, and the way we research lives in the early modern period. Each of the chapters of this thesis discusses archival sources that critical biography and bibliography have traditionally looked to for biographical details of Hills’ life. These include a Particular Baptist confession-cum-conversion account entitled The Prodigal Returned, said to have been composed by Hills in 1651 while he served a prison sentence in the Fleet for adultery. I also discuss three accounts of Hills’ high-profile conversion to Catholicism in the mid-1680s, which were authored between 1684 and 1733. The thesis provides a detailed analysis of a conspiracy story, first published in 1697, which posthumously cast Hills as a key player in a bibliographical scandal that is said to have taken place in 1649. I also pay close attention to Hills’ last will and testament, a document that spawned a number of very public legal contestations amongst members of the Hills family. Through a close, historicised reading of these materials, this thesis adds new discussions of the way in which Hills was read and contested by his contemporaries, later historians, and bibliographers, and throughout I retain a sense of the highly mediated nature of the evidence we use to reconstruct Hills biographically, while stressing his importance in the cultural imagination of the period.

Over the course of the 1830s and 1840s, a professional scientific and medical community was coming into being. Exclusive membership, limits to the definition of science, and separation of the professional from the popular sphere became important elements in the consolidation of scientific authority. Studies exploring Victorian scientific authority have tended to focus on professional journals and organs of middle-class culture; this thesis takes a new approach in exploring how this authority is reflected and negotiated across the content of the popular mass-market periodicals which provided leisure reading for working- and lower-class men and women. It uses as examples Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, Reynolds's Miscellany and the Family Herald. The readers of these publications were consumers of scientific information, participants in popularised science and beneficiaries and subjects of new research, but were increasingly excluded from the formal processes of developing scientific theory and practice. Examining representations of anatomy and of mesmerism, health advice and theories of class and gender, the thesis argues for an expanded understanding of mass-market periodicals as communicators of scientific ideas, showing how such material widely informs the content of these publications from fiction to jokes to full-length factual articles. However, the role of the periodicals is much wider than simply the transmission of received ideas, and the thesis reveals a plurality of positions with regard to science and medicine within the popular press. The periodicals engage with modern science in complex and varied ways, accepting, modifying and challenging scientific theories and methods from different positions. The form of the periodical is key, presenting multiple sources of knowledge and ways in which readers may be invited to respond. Chambers's broad support for scientific progress is informed by its useful knowledge identity but tempered by its founding editor's own ambivalent relationship to the scientific establishment. The Herald, influenced by both the periodical's commercial character and its editor's adherence to a spiritual, anti-materialist view of existence, is strongly resistant to modern science, while Reynolds's incorporates it alongside other forms of knowledge in its aim to educate, entertain and empower readers from a socialist perspective.

The small island of St Barthélemy was a Swedish colony 1784–1878 and saw its greatest population growth and trade during the turn of the nineteenth century. This was because of Gustavia, the Swedish founded free port, which attracted mariners from the Caribbean, North America and Europe. Their goal was to become Swedish subjects, as Swedish neutrality provided a benefit during the various wars at this time between France, Great Britain and the United States. As these mariners changed their national allegiance from their country of origin to Sweden, questions about their political rights emerged. The makeup, as well as the role, of the local council became a contested issue between native and naturalized Swedes. This conflict, as well as many other local and global issues, was discussed in various mediums. I have examined petitions, the newspaper The Report of Saint Bartholomew and discussions within the council, to create an understanding of how political expression was formed by the population, as well as controlled by Swedish administrators. This analysis has been performed through an intersectional framework considering gender, race and ethnicity. My study shows that while most native and naturalized Swedes believed in input from the population, they had different perceptions of what the purpose of this input was. The Swedish administration saw the political participation of the naturalized population as purely advisory, without any obligation to perform its wishes, which the population resented and protested. Gender played a significant role in the formation of political expression, as masculinity was essential to the identity of white men and free men of colour as political subjects. Yet ethnicity, in terms of place of birth, had no significant impact among the free population’s political identity, although it did render them politically unreliable in the eye of native Swedish administration.

Through examining the common themes in the writings of five anarchist women writers, I argue their writings are representative of ideological regionalism, or the convergence of factors that give rise to a political ideology that is then expounded through the literary production of a particular time and place. I analyze the economic, sexual, and “religious” politics across fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, connecting arguments about class, individualism, feminism, and anarchism to a foundation of Midwestern cultural ideology. Ultimately, I argue that economic, political, and historical conditions promulgated an exceptionalist American anarchism rooted in settler anti-statism. <br>

This thesis studies print culture in colonial Lagos against the background of the public sphere, and brings together a variety of English-language and Yoruba-language newspapers. Such an approach allows for highlighting the practicalities of newspaper production and foregrounding the work accomplished by newspapermen in a changing 'information environment' and political context. It offers insights into Lagos politics, contributes to the history of the educated elite, and to more global histories of communication. Using newspapers as well as archival records, and focussing on events that strikingly reveal dynamics in the public sphere, this thesis narrates a nuanced history of a discursive field which was, amongst other things, central for Lagos politics. This thesis complicates a Habermasian notion of the public sphere as an open discursive space, and not only highlights that the public sphere was an arena of contested meanings, but also illustrates axes along which the composition of this social structure was negotiated. When newspapers emerged in the late nineteenth-century, discussions in the press were largely restricted to the elite. The economy of recognition that was at play in the public sphere was to change in the 1920s. This thesis highlights how newspapermen and contributors sought to carve out niches for themselves in the public sphere in new ways and how their becoming a speaker in this discursive field was challenged and contested. It highlights the nuanced ways in which newspapermen and contributors convened publics through their papers: how they did so around particular issues, in distinction from each other, and how they adapted the convening of publics to new political dynamics in the 1940s. This thesis gives insight into the complex relationship between English-language and Yoruba-language newspapers, and moreover illustrates how the practicalities of the newspaper business were coming to bear on dynamics in the public sphere.

This dissertation examines encounters between humans and snakes from the 1780s to the 1860s, principally focusing upon Britain and British India, to reassess the production and circulation of natural historical knowledge. Serpents were at once familiar and ambiguous in nineteenth-century Britain and its empire, present at every level of society through Scripture, works of natural history, and imperial print culture. They appeared across literary genres - in works of art, as dead specimens in museums, and living attractions in shows and menageries - and their material and figurative presence in London was dependent upon British imperial networks. Snakes loomed disproportionately large in the imperial imaginary, where they were entangled in a discourse of difference. The practices of the natural history of snakes were harnessed to personal ambition and colonial exigencies. By analyzing scientific books and papers, newspapers and periodicals, taxidermy and cartoons, travel accounts, and government archives from Britain and India, this study provides a connected account of how snakes were collected, transported, described, experimented with, and used for a variety of ends. Following an animal around, whether as material, textual, or visual representation, reveals a more comprehensive picture of how people engaged with animals in the nineteenth century, not confined by disciplinary or institutional boundaries at a time when these were being constructed. The cultural and emotive power of snakes makes visible the heterogeneous nature of those contributing to the production of natural historical knowledge. This thesis shows how the moral character of snakes was implicated in how they were encountered and understood by a range of actors, from museum naturalists to imperial agents, and Indian snake-charmers to working-class visitors to the zoo. The chapters examine different but overlapping modes of encounter with snakes: collecting, preserving, and presenting them in museum settings; the imbrication of anthropocentric concerns in attempts to classify and anatomize them; the mechanisms and motivations behind attempts to produce authoritative 'useful knowledge' incorporating vivisectional experiments in the Madras Presidency in the late eighteenth century; Orientalist representations of non-European interactions with snakes in nascent print culture; and the emotional economy of educational displays of living snakes in metropolitan Britain, especially with the emergence of new spaces for natural history, notably the first reptile house at the Zoological Gardens in Regent's Park. The approach brings together insights from from history of science, animal history, and new imperial histories to recover an affective dimension of natural history in imperial encounters.

Since 1986, the Catholic Our Lady of Victory (OLV) parish of Lackawanna, NY and the diocese of Buffalo have been working to secure canonization for Father Nelson H. Baker (1842-1936), founder of the North American branch of the Association of Our Lady of Victory and the OLV Basilica and Institutes, which, among other services, included a hospital, orphanage and school. Lackawanna is also the site of the Bethlehem Steel Plant closings of the early 1980s, which have come to symbolize the Buffalo region's difficult and troubled transition to a post-industrial economy. Thus, I frame my dissertation with the overall idea that the possibility of Baker's sainthood offers hope for economic recovery to the city of Lackawanna. Specifically, this work seeks to combine the study of material history with the study of lived religion by using performativity as a theoretical tool. Through a comprehensive presentation of the material history of Father Nelson H. Baker from the 1880s to 2006, I demonstrate that material history is a significant, integral and vital component of lived religion. Further, I make the case that devotional practices include creative acts that both provide evidence of Baker¹s sanctity for his cause and contribute to the performative nature of his material history. As such, this work attempts 1)to fill in a gap in the scholarship about contemporary Catholic sainthood in the U.S. by focusing on a specific cause for sainthood, 2) to further develop an understanding of the communal processes of representing sanctity,3) to offer a way of combining analyses of the built environment, material, print and visual culture with the study of lived religion, and 4) to expand the scope of scholarly approaches to Catholic devotional practices by demonstrating that in the Baker case, devotional practices involve a cooperative effort by both official and popular agents in the creation of material items to promote and further a cause. Visual materials are presented in the body of the text in JPEG format