Cultural Narratives

Textuality and Performance in American Culture before 1900

Sandra M. Gustafson

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780268029760, 9780268205973
• eBook ISBN: 9780268080617
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: Literature

This collection of original essays examines debates on how written, printed, visual, and performed works produced meaning in American culture before 1900. The contributors argue that America has been a multimedia culture since the eighteenth century. According to Sandra M. Gustafson, the verbal arts before 1900 manifest a strikingly rich pattern of development and change. From the wide variety of indigenous traditions, through the initial productions of settler communities, to the elaborations of colonial, postcolonial, and national expressive forms, the shifting dynamics of performed, manuscript-based, and printed verbal art capture critical elements of rapidly changing societies.

The contributors address performances of religion and government, race and gender, poetry, theater, and song. Their studies are based on texts—intended for reading silently or out loud—maps, recovered speech, and pictorial sources. As these essays demonstrate, media, even when they appear to be fixed, reflected a dynamic American experience.

Contributors: Caroline F. Sloat, Matthew P. Brown, David S. Shields, Martin Brückner, Jeffrey H. Richards, Phillip H. Round, Hilary E. Wyss, Angela Vietto, Katherine Wilson, Joan Newlon Radner, Ingrid Satelmajer, Joycelyn Moody, Philip F. Gura, Coleman Hutchison, Oz Frankel, Susan S. Williams, Laura Burd Schiavo, and Sandra M. Gustafson

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Hand Piety; or, Operating a Book in Early New England
• 2. Poor Performance
• 3. Addressing Maps in British America
• 4. Print, Manuscript, and Staged Performance
• 5. From Performance to Print in the Native Northeast
• 6. Beyond the Printed Word
• 7. Sarah Wentworth Morton and Changing Models of Authorship
• 8. The Path of a Play Script
• 9. “The Speaking Eye and the Listening Ear”
• 10. Print Poetry as Oral “Event”in Nineteenth-Century American Periodicals
• 11. Silenced Women and Silent Language in Early Abolitionist Serials
• 12. Straddling the Color Line
• 13. Secret in Altered Lines
• 14. The State Between Orality and Textuality
• 15. Authentic Revisions
• 16. Reading the Image
• 17. The Emerging Media of Early America
• Contributors
• Index