Print Culture Histories Beyond the Metropolis

by James J. Connolly (Editor), Patrick Collier (Editor), Frank Felsenstein (Editor), Kenneth R. Hall (Editor), Robert Hall (Editor)

Overview

Bringing together leading scholars of literature, history, library studies, and communications, Print Culture Histories Beyond the Metropolis rejects the idea that print culture necessarily spreads outwards from capitals and cosmopolitan cities and focuses attention to how the residents of smaller cities, provincial districts, rural settings, and colonial outposts have produced, disseminated, and read print materials.

Too often print media has been represented as an engine of metropolitan modernity. Rather than being the passive recipients of print culture generated in city centres, the inhabitants of provinces and colonies have acted independently, as jobbing printers in provincial Britain, black newspaper proprietors in the West Indies, and library patrons in “Middletown,” Indiana, to mention a few examples. This important new book gives us a sophisticated account of how printed materials circulated, a more precise sense of their impact, and a fuller of understanding of how local contexts shaped reading experiences.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781442650626
Publisher:	University of Toronto Press
Publication date:	03/24/2016
Series:	Studies in Book and Print Culture
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

James J. Connolly is the George and Frances Ball Distinguished Professor in the Department of History at Ball State University.
Patrick Collier is a professor in the Department of English at Ball State University.
Frank Felsenstein is the Reed D. Voran Honors Distinguished Professor in Humanities in the Department of English at Ball State University.
Kenneth R. Hall is a professor in the Department of History at Ball State University.
Robert G. Hall is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Ball State University.

Table of Contents

Print Culture Histories Beyond the Metropolis: An Introduction
By Patrick Collier and James J. Connolly

Part I: Circulation

Non-Metropolitan Printing and Business in Britain and Ireland between the Sixteenth and Eighteenth Centuries
By James Raven

“I have hitherto been entirely upon the borrowing hand”: The Acquisition and Circulation of Books in Early Eighteenth-Century Dissenting Academies
By Kyle Roberts

The 18th- and Early 19th-Century Evolution of Indian Print Culture and Knowledge Networks in Calcutta and Madras
By Kenneth R. Hall

Beyond the Market and the City: The Informal Dissemination of Reading Material During the American Civil War
By Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray

Cosmopolitan Ideals, Local Loyalties, and Print Culture: The Career of George Chandler Bragdon In Upstate New York
By Joan Shelley Rubin

What Travels? The Movement of Movements; or, Ephemeral Bibelots from Paris to Lansing, with Love
By Brad Evans

Circum-Atlantic Print Circuits and Internationalism from the Peripheries in the Interwar Era
By Lara Putnam

Part II: Place
At the Dawn of the Information Age: Reading and the Working Classes in Ashton-under-Lyne, 1830–1850
By Robert Hall

Uneasy Occupancy: Sarah Grand, The Beth Book and a Colonial Reader
By Lydia Wevers

Alger, Fosdick, and Stratemeyer in the Heartland: Crossover Reading in Muncie, Indiana, 1891–1902
By Joel Shrock

Romance in the Province: Reading German Novels in Middletown, USA
By Lynne Tatlock

Print Culture and Cosmopolitan Trends in 1890s Muncie, Indiana
By Frank Felsenstein

Zones of Connection: Common Reading in a Regional Australian Library
By Julieanne Lamond

Organized Print: Clara Steen and Institutional Sites of Reading and Writing in the American Midwest, 1895–1920
By Christine Pawley

What People are Saying About This

Archie L. Dick

"Print Culture Histories beyond the Metropolis transcends a powerful metropolitan focus in print culture studies to shape an argument for the equal treatment of towns in Britain, Ireland, India, the United States, and antipodean outposts as centres of cultural activity. Letters, diaries, reading statistics, and private archives provide the kind of primary data that many print culture scholars crave and envy, and the contributing authors have woven the data into compellingly readable essays."

Editorial Reviews

‘A discerning look into provincial reading experiences that will offer an extended view of the world for scholars of sociocultural and print history…Highly recommended.’

—R.L. Wadham, Choice vol 54:03:2016

"Print Culture Histories beyond the Metropolis transcends a powerful metropolitan focus in print culture studies to shape an argument for the equal treatment of towns in Britain, Ireland, India, the United States, and antipodean outposts as centres of cultural activity. Letters, diaries, reading statistics, and private archives provide the kind of primary data that many print culture scholars crave and envy, and the contributing authors have woven the data into compellingly readable essays."

—Archie L. Dick, Department of Information Science, University of Pretoria

From the Publisher

'A discerning look into provincial reading experiences that will offer an extended view of the world for scholars of sociocultural and print history...Highly recommended.'

Choice vol 54:03:2016 - R.L. Wadham