Thinking Outside the Book
180 pages, 6 x 9
15 b&w photos
Paperback
Release Date:15 Sep 2014
ISBN:9781625341266
Thinking Outside the Book
University of Massachusetts Press
In Thinking Outside the Book, Augusta Rohrbach works through the increasing convergences between digital humanities and literary studies to explore the meaning and primacy of the book as a literary, material, and cultural artifact. Rohrbach assembles a rather unlikely cohort of nineteenth-century women writers—Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Sojourner Truth, Hannah Crafts, Augusta Evans, and Mary Chesnut—to consider the publishing culture of their period from the perspective of our current digital age, bringing together scholarly concepts from both print culture and new media studies.
In nineteenth-century America, women from a variety of racial and class affiliations were bombarding the print market with their literary productions, taking advantage of burgeoning rates of literacy and advances in publishing technology. Their work challenged prevailing modes of authorship and continues to do so today. Each chapter of Thinking Outside the Book positions a focal figure as both paradigmatic and problematic within the context of key terms that define the study of the book. In lieu of terms such as literacy, authorship, publication, edition, and editor, Rohrbach develops an alternate typology that includes mediation, memory, history, testimony, and loss. Recognizing that the field spans radio, cinema, television, and the Internet, she draws comparisons to the present day, when Web 2.0 allows writers from varying backgrounds and positions to seek out readers without "gatekeepers" limiting their exposure.
More than a literary history, this book takes up theories of recovery, literacy, authorship, narrative, the book, and new media in connection with race, gender, class, and region.
In nineteenth-century America, women from a variety of racial and class affiliations were bombarding the print market with their literary productions, taking advantage of burgeoning rates of literacy and advances in publishing technology. Their work challenged prevailing modes of authorship and continues to do so today. Each chapter of Thinking Outside the Book positions a focal figure as both paradigmatic and problematic within the context of key terms that define the study of the book. In lieu of terms such as literacy, authorship, publication, edition, and editor, Rohrbach develops an alternate typology that includes mediation, memory, history, testimony, and loss. Recognizing that the field spans radio, cinema, television, and the Internet, she draws comparisons to the present day, when Web 2.0 allows writers from varying backgrounds and positions to seek out readers without "gatekeepers" limiting their exposure.
More than a literary history, this book takes up theories of recovery, literacy, authorship, narrative, the book, and new media in connection with race, gender, class, and region.
Rohrbach's readings and archival work demonstrate how valuable the decentering of authorship can be for understanding how racialized and marginalized subjects relate to the literary marketplace, to be sure, but also simply for understanding the networked quality of the marketplace itself in the nineteenth century.'—Matt Cohen, author of The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England
'Thinking Outside the Book offers no less than a searching examination of the language, status, and cultural relevance of the concepts that have motivated so much of the critical thinking about the book as medium, witness, and authority.'—David Greetham, author of The Pleasures of Contamination: Evidence, Text, and Voice in Textual Studies
'Ambitious, even valiant. . . . Thinking Outside the Book will be a very good read for those who want to see Dickinson's work in the context of a much more materially diverse and unruly nineteenth-century literary culture than we are usually wont to engage, and understand her place among a larger sorority of American writers who chose not to tie their fortunes to establishment vehicles like the book.'—Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin
'Rohrbach's goal in Thinking Outside the Book is to theorize a new way of thinking about what is 'literary' in 'literary history.' The books Rohrbach discusses will appeal to students in feminist studies and American History, and her main argument requires a solid understanding of the the theories and methodologies found in digital humanities and book history. Recommended.'—Choice
'Rohrbach successfully illustrates that textual production was a site of agency and resistance, while demonstrating the need to question traditional approaches to authorship and the book.'—American Literature to 1900
Augusta Rohrbach, an independent scholar, is the editor of ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance and author of Truth Stranger than Fiction: Race, Realism, and the U.S. Literary Marketplace.
