300 pages, 6 x 9
18
Paperback
Release Date:25 Aug 2023
ISBN:9781625347190
Hardcover
Release Date:25 Aug 2023
ISBN:9781625347206
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Handwriting in Early America

A Media History

University of Massachusetts Press

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, Christopher Hager, Desirée Henderson, Frank Kelderman, Michelle Levy, Lisa Maruca, Christen Mucher, Alan Niles, Seth Perlow, Carla L. Peterson, Sarah Robbins, Patricia Jane Roylance, Karen Sánchez-Eppler, and Danielle Skeehan.

‘Whether thinking critically about what genre a handwritten object embodies, what its material specificities tell us, or how anxieties over the medium have existed in the past, Handwriting in Early America provides digestible examples to spur you. Because, as it turns out, being able to read and understand handwriting isn’t just for 'steampunk fantasies.' It’s a powerful tool for archival and literary studies, and this volume shows just how far scholars can push our thinking when they put it into practice.’—Jayne Ptolemy, SHARP News

‘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

MARK ALAN MATTES is assistant professor of English at the University of Louisville.

List of Figures and Tables
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

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