The Part and the Whole in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art / edited by Matthew Pethers [and nine others].

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Pethers, Matthew, editor.

Couch, Daniel Diez, editor.

Series:

Transits (Bucknell University)

Transits

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American prose literature--History and criticism.

American prose literature.

Books and reading--United States--History--18th century.

Books and reading.

Art and society--United States--History--18th century.

Art and society.

Genre:

Essays.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (293 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Lewisburg, PA : Bucknell University Press, [2024]

Summary:

"The essays in this pathbreaking collection consider the significance of varied early American fragmentary genres and practices-from diaries and poetry, to almanacs and commonplace books, to sermons and lists, to Indigenous ruins and other material shards and fragments-often overlooked by critics in a scholarly privileging of the "whole." Contributors from literary studies, book history, and visual culture discuss a host of canonical and non-canonical figures, from Edward Taylor and Washington Irving to Mary Rowlandson and Sarah Kemble Knight, offering insight into the many intellectual, ideological, and material variations of "form" that populated the early American cultural landscape. As these essays reveal, the casting of the fragmentary as aesthetically eccentric or incomplete was a way of reckoning with concerns about the related fragmentation of nation, society, and self. For a contemporary audience, they offer new ways to think about the inevitable gaps and absences in our cultural and historical archive"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Cover

Series Page

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

Introduction: Parting with Wholes in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art

Part One: Partial Histories

1. Reading for Unreadability

or, Embracing the Gaps in Congregational Church Records

2. "Textural Scholarship": Susan Howe's Mary Rowlandson

3. "Composing My Resentments": Process and Palimpsest in Sarah Kemble Knight's The Journal of Madam Knight

4. Fragments, Scraps, and the Formalism of the Historical Imagination

Part Two: Fragmentary Communities

5. Reading Early American Almanacs: Imagining Unity in Parts and Pieces

6. Lists and List-Makers of the African Atlantic Archive

7. Failed Periodicals, Forgotten Satires, and Alternative Forms of Dissent in Antebellum America

Part Three: Visible Assemblages

8. The Early National Picturesque

9. Visualizing the Incompleteness of "Mound-Builder" Ruins

10. Edward Taylor and the Art of Assemblage

Notes on Contributors

Index.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-68448-509-6

1-68448-510-X

OCLC:

1429739613