Studies in Ephemera

Text and Image in Eighteenth-Century Print

Kevin Murphy, Sally O'Driscoll

• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781611484953
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Art & Politics
• Index: Literature

Studies in Ephemera: Text and Image in Eighteenth-Century Print bringstogether established and emerging scholars of early modern print culture to explore the dynamic relationships between words and illustrations in awide variety of popular cheap print from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. While ephemerawas ubiquitous in the period, it is scarcely visible to us now, because only a handful of the thousands of examplesonce in existence have been preserved. Nonetheless, single-sheet printed works, as well as pamphlets and chapbooks, constituted a central part of visual and literary culture, and were eagerly consumed by rich and poor alike in Great Britain, North America, and on the Continent. Displayed in homes, posted in taverns and other public spaces, or visible in shop windows on city streets, ephemeral works used sensational means to address themes of great topicality. The English broadside ballad, of central concern in this volume, grew out of oral culture; the genre addressed issues of nationality, history, gender and sexuality, economics, and more.

Richly illustrated and well researched, Studiesin Ephemera offers interdisciplinary perspectives into how ephemeralworks reached their audiences through visual and textual means. It also includes essays that describe how collections of ephemera are categorized in digital and conventional archives, and how our understanding of these works is shaped by their organization into collections. This timely and fascinating book will appeal to archivists, and students and scholars in many fields, including art history, comparative literature, social and economic history, and English literature.

Contributors: Georgia Barnhill, Theodore Barrow, Tara Burk, Adam Fox, Alexandra Franklin, Patricia Fumerton, Paula McDowell, Kevin D. Murphy, Sally O'Driscoll, Ruth Perry

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction: “Fugitive Pieces” and “Gaudy Books”: Textual, Historical, and Visual Interpretations of Ephemera in the Long Eighteenth Century
• Part I: Definitions and Categorizations
• Chapter 2: Of Grubs and Other Insects: Constructing the Categories of “Ephemera” and “Literature” in Eighteenth-Century British Writing
• Chapter 3: Digitizing Ephemera and Its Discontents: EBBA’s Quest to Capture the Protean Broadside Ballad
• Chapter 4: What Gets Printed from Oral Tradition: Anna Gordon’s Ephemeral Ballads
• Chapter 5: Approaches to Ephemera: Scottish Broadsides, 1679–1746
• Chapter 6: Ephemera at the American Antiquarian Society: Perspectives on Commercial Life in the Long Eighteenth Century
• Part II: Text and Image
• Chapter 7: Making Sense of Broadside Ballad Illustrations in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
• Chapter 8: “A Battleground around the Crime”: The Visuality of Execution Ephemera and Its Cultural Significances in Late Seventeenth-Century England
• Chapter 9: From “The Easter Wedding” to “The Frantick Lover”: The Repeated Woodcut and Its Shifting Roles
• Chapter 10: What Kind of Man Do the Clothes Make? Print Culture and the Meanings of Macaroni Effeminacy
• Bibliography
• About the Contributors