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Material Texts
Material Texts explores cultural technologies of communication—books, manuscripts, scrolls, films, graffiti, the actor’s voice—with particular attention to the ways specific material forms affect meaning.
Series Editors:
Roger Chartier
Director of Studies, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
Joseph Farrell
Professor of Classics, University of Pennsylvania
Anthony Grafton
Professor of History, Princeton University
Leah Price
Professor of English, Harvard University
Peter Stallybrass
Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania
Michael F. Suarez, S.J.
Associate Professor of English, Fordham University
Staff Editorial Contact:
Walter Biggins, Editor-in-Chief wbiggins@upenn.edu
Print-Based Activism Against Slavery, Racism, and Discrimination, 1829-1851
Marcy J. Dinius
Price: $34.95
ISBN: 9781512828801
Pub Date: November 2025
Format: Paperback
312 Pages
In The Textual Effects of David Walker's "Appeal" Marcy J. Dinius offers the first in-depth analysis of Walker's argumentatively and typographically radical pamphlet and its direct influence on five Black and Indigenous activist authors, Maria W. Stewart, William Apess, William Paul Quinn, Henry Highland Garnet, and Paola Brown.
With nearly 200 illustrations, Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms offers both a broad survey of the physical forms and cultural histories of manuscripts and a dozen particularly significant case studies, including the Beowulf manuscript, the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, and The Book of Margery Kempe.
Featuring more than 80 illustrations and easy access to related music files, this magisterial work argues that a ballad cannot be read as a fixed artifact, independent of its illustrations, tune, and movement across time and space.
Objects of Intercultural Encounters and the Boundaries of Book History
Edited by Rhae Lynn Barnes and Glenda Goodman
Price: $74.95
ISBN: 9781512825770
Pub Date: August 2024
Format: Hardcover
456 Pages
American Contact explores the dynamics of intercultural encounters through the medium of material texts. Its forty-eight short chapters shed new light on the material practices of communicating power and resistance, subjection and survivance, in contact zones of America from millennia in the past to the 2000s.
Daniel O'Quinn investigates the complex interpersonal, political, and aesthetic relationships between Europeans and Ottomans in the long eighteenth century. Richly illustrated and provocatively argued, Engaging the Ottoman Empire demonstrates that study of the Ottoman world is vital to understanding European modernity.
In Won in Translation Roger Chartier considers the mobility of the early modern text and the plurality of circulating versions of the same work. The agent for both is translation, for through their lexical, aesthetic, and cultural decisions, translators always assign new meaning or new status to what they translate.
In Bitstreams, Matthew G. Kirschenbaum distills twenty years of thinking about the intersection of digital media, textual studies, and literary archives to argue that bits—the ubiquitous ones and zeros of computing— always depend on the material world that surrounds them to form the bulwark for preserving the future of literary heritage.
Illuminators and the Making of English Literature, 1403-1476
Sonja Drimmer
Price: $39.95
ISBN: 9780812224849
Pub Date: June 2021
Format: Paperback
352 Pages
Featuring more than one hundred illustrations, 27 of them in color, The Art of Allusion amply exhibits the critical role book artists played in the formation of the English literary canon.
Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women's Poetry
Jennifer Putzi
Price: $69.95
ISBN: 9780812253467
Pub Date: October 2021
Format: Hardcover
320 Pages
Focusing on nineteenth-century poetry written by working-class and African American women, Jennifer Putzi demonstrates how an emphasis on relationships between and among people and texts shaped the poems that women wrote, the avenues they took to gain access to print, and the way their poems functioned within a variety of print cultures.
Printing the Universe in Nineteenth-Century America
Gordon Fraser
Price: $39.95
ISBN: 9780812252927
Pub Date: June 2021
Format: Hardcover
264 Pages
In Star Territory Gordon Fraser charts how the project of rationalizing the cosmos enabled the nineteenth-century expansion of U.S. territory and explores the alternative and resistant cosmologies of free and enslaved Blacks and indigenous peoples.
