The nature of the page : poetry, papermaking, and the ecology of texts in Renaissance England / Joshua Calhoun.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Calhoun, Joshua, 1979- author.

Contributor:

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library (University of Pennsylvania)

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

Series:

Material texts

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--Early modern, 1500-1700--Criticism, Textual.

English literature.

Paper--England--History--16th century.

Paper.

Paper--England--History--17th century.

Papermaking--England--History--16th century.

Papermaking.

Papermaking--England--History--17th century.

Books and reading--England--History--16th century.

Books and reading.

History.

Criticism, Textual.

English literature--Early modern.

England.

Books and reading--England--History--17th century.

Human ecology and the humanities.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

History.

Physical Description:

xii, 212 pages : illustrations ; 27 cm.

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2020]

Summary:

"This book discusses paper in Renaissance England-about what it was elementally, and about what it was not; about what a page of paper did, what it was made to do, and what it would not do; about what it made representable and unrepresentable, recordable and revisable, preservable and destructible. Paper is the product of nature and culture, of nonhuman and human agency. This book is also an environmental story about the ecology of paper and about the ecosystems in which poets and plants can become (and un-become) Renaissance literature. And because plants, like humans, will eventually deteriorate, this is also a story about corruption-corruption and replication and the desperate hope that we can out-replicate the thing we love so as to preserve it from decay"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Part I Legible Ecologies

Chapter 1 Substances Used to Convey Ideas: Ship Sails, Cellulose, and Spinning Wheels p. 19

Chapter 2 The Word Made Flax: Cheap Bibles, Textual Corruption, and the Poetics of Paper p. 45

Part II Indistinct Ecologies

Chapter 3 How to Read a Blot: Historiography and Renaissance Ecologies of Inscriptive Error p. 73

Chapter 4 Sizing Matters: Annotating Animals in Renaissance England p. 99

Chapter 5 This Book, as Long Lived as the Elements: Climate Control, Biodeterioration, and the Poetics of Decay p. 126.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

ISBN:

9780812251890

081225189X

OCLC:

1124777089