The Rise of New Media 1750–1850

Transatlantic Discourse and American Memory

Julia Straub

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781137589798
• eBook ISBN: 9781137581686
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: Literature

This monograph explores transatlantic literary culture by tracing the proliferation of 'new media,' such as the anthology, the literary history and the magazine, in the period between 1750 and 1850. The fast-paced media landscape out of which these publishing genres developed produced the need of a 'memory of literature' and a concomitant rhetoric of remembering strikingly similar to what today is called a cultural memory debate. Thus, rather than depicting the emergence of an American national literature, The Rise of New Media(1750–1850) combines impulses from media history, the history of print, the sociology of literature and canon theory to uncover nascent forms and genres of literary self-reflectivity and early stirrings of a canon debate in the Atlantic World.

Table of contents

• The Rise of New Media 1750–1850
• 1 Introduction: Building an American Memory of Literature, 1750–1850
• 2 Remembering Literature in Early America: Transatlanticism, Cultural Memory, and Its Media
• 3 Virtual Museums: The Literary Magazine and Transatlantic Periodical Culture
• 4 Of Gems, Beauties, and Relics: Anthologies in Early America
• 5 Early Forms of Literary Historiography in America: Literary Histories as Narrative Anthologies
• 6 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index