This chapter focuses on the political commitments of the Cénacle, a group of authors whose writings appeared in Haitian print culture in the 1830s. Among the Cénacle’s political aims was the development of a unique national literature structured around a democratic romanticization of Black and Indigenous figures. While scholars have traditionally historicized the Haitian Cénacle as merely imitative of French romanticism, this chapter argues that the writings of the Cénacle instead reveal the limitations of idealized European romantic citizenship. In particular, Haitian romanticism’s engagement with Vodou, and specifically Vodou as practiced by women and gender fluid people, offers a different way of imagining collective historical memory, albeit one that cannot be fully embraced by the writers of the Cénacle. Through readings of Haitian print culture, this chapter demonstrates how the Cénacle mobilized Haitian Vodou practices in order to reshape the nation’s political future, and in doing so, attends to the unnamed Vodouwizans abandoned in the margins of romantic history.

This chapter discusses the importance of periodicals in the development of Australian poetry. It discusses the centrality of the Bulletin to an emergent nationalist tradition, before considering the Vitalist movement through Vision and the encouragement of modernism in Stream and Angry Penguins. It argues that the academic journal Southerly reinforced an early canon of Australian poetry in the 1940s while the establishment of Overland and Quadrant represented differing political poles in the 1950s. It maps a growing sense of regional diversity through magazines like Westerly, Island, and LINQ, which would supplement Meanjin’s early focus. The chapter then outlines the support of a new generation of writers in the 1970s through Poetry Magazine, later New Poetry, and Poetry Australia. While arguing for Scripsi’s crucial role in the 1980s, the chapter points to the emergence of specialist little magazines around work, multiculturalism, and feminism. The chapter discusses how this diversity would be strengthened in the 1990s, while the emergence of online journals like Jacket and Cordite Poetry Review provided renewed vibrancy and global recognition for Australian poetry.

In the first decades of the printed book in Britain, the book trade was dominated by bookmakers from continental Europe. However, as the trade expanded and was consolidated by the incorporation of the Stationers’ Company in 1557, it has been treated as if it became more insular. Landmark histories of the book in Britain in the sixteenth century have, until recent years, tended to overestimate the extent to which books that were read in Britain were printed in Britain. As part of a revisionist trend in this field, this chapter explores the intertwined relationship between continental printers and booksellers in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. How did English authors view the possibilities, opportunities, and dangers of printing in continental Europe? How did religious, political, and commercial motives intertwine to encourage the printing of Latin works produced in England on the continent? And how were those continental printings of Latin works read and consumed back in England? Overall, the chapter offers a significant contribution to our ongoing reassessment of the interfused relationship between the history of the British and continental European book.

This chapter examines the print cultural history of queer pulp fiction in the 1950s, paying special attention to obscenity challenges as well as to the cultural afterlives of pulps in contemporary queer culture.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the term “literature” was used broadly to describe any printed text. By the turn of the century, its meaning had narrowed to refer specifically to aesthetic verbal objects with distinctive features of authorship and form. This change was brought on by rapid transformations in print culture. Literature created its readership mainly through periodicals: newspapers, leaflets, pamphlets, illustrated weeklies, magazines of mass and high culture. Periodicals were not only the medium for all literary genres but were also key in the professionalization of writers and the making of national literatures. They were a powerful tool to shape the literary imagination of a growing and increasingly more diversified reading public. Through the publication of serialized novels, essays, and reviews, periodicals such as La Nación, Sud-América, and Caras y Caretas were essential to the process of literary autonomy in Argentina. In this chapter the history of this process is outlined and those cases in which developments in print culture framed some of the most significant works of Argentine literature are discussed.

This chapter analyses the impact of the 1810 Revolution and its aftermath in the making of Argentine literature. Political affairs fueled the circulation of locally produced printed matter. Patriot leaders engaged in writing, and memoirs, letters, speeches, proclamations, and newspaper articles soon became part of a new arena of public debates. This new print culture was also aimed at reaching lower-class audiences, crucial for the victory of the patriotic endeavor. Texts were often read aloud for those who were illiterate – the overwhelming majority of the population– and even published in translation in Indigenous languages. Thus, the Revolution generated a zone of encounter between the literate classes and the oral culture of plebeian sectors.  This zone of encounter, together with the revalorization of the gauchos, gave birth to a surprising cultural expression  called gauchesque poetry, the first literary genre of a distinctive local flavor. A rather peculiar type of literature, it was a written genre imitating the oral style of rural inhabitants. The plebeian voice thus acquired a central location in the nascent local letters, thus destabilizing the boundaries between social classes and their cultures. This transgression would have a lasting impact on Argentine literature.

In the 1980s, a theoretical turn in African American literary criticism helped institutionalize the study of African American literature by insisting on its formal complexity and distinctiveness. The racial text could no longer be read as reducible to its social context. In that same decade, a materialist line of inquiry sought to reconcile formal and contextual analysis by examining the ways black-authored books were published by major companies and received by the critical establishment. Drawing on methods from book history and print culture studies, a sociology of African American literature developed as the academic field of study took shape around canon-building projects. Two approaches to African American literary sociology emerged out of the 1990s: skepticism about the book’s capacity to represent racial experience, and optimism about the commercial success of diverse authors. Over time, these approaches merged into general studies of the racial text’s shifting status in the literary marketplace. With that expanded focus, the sociology of African American literature today sheds light on the way culture and commerce intersect in the making, selling, and reading of black-authored books.

This chapter’s focus is the nineteenth century, at the moment of ascendency of the popular magazine in capitalist print culture, when the essay achieved new prominence as well as a somewhat altered function as a marketable vehicle for literary criticism aimed at a popular audience. Edgar Allan Poe in particular harnessed the essay’s power to articulate a unique aesthetic philosophy and influenced generations of poet-essayists and poet-critics. While literary artists such as Lydia Maria Child, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass exemplified the many writers whose innovations appeared in what one might call the philosophical, political, or ruminative essay, Poe worked assiduously to found his literary reputation not only on his poetry but on an innovative form of the magazine essay as an exercise in expert aesthetic criticism. Poe’s work as a literary critic working in and editing commercial magazines helped reshape both the popular and the critical sense of the nature and potential of literary art, especially poetry, in the modern world in ways that remain vital, if controversial, to both poets and critics today.

Turning from communities of free people of color in Louisiana to New York City, Chapter 3, “Freedom’s Conduit: Spiritual Justice in ‘Theresa, A Haytien Tale’,” examines early African-American print culture, particularly the first African American short story, the anonymously authored “Theresa, A Haytean Tale” (1828). While Haitian Revolutionary histories in the US have often centered on Toussaint Louverture, “Theresa” follows the travails of a young woman and her all-female family in their struggle for Haitian independence. A cross-dressing spy against the French, Theresa frequently experiences visitations, possessions, and visions from God. Theresa’s political and spiritual labor forms a complex network of spiritual cosmologies and Haitian Revolutionary iconographies that help expand colonized understandings of gender and sexuality. In doing so, the tale reroutes the energy systems of both colonial plantation violence and early African-American domesticity by imagining a prophetic form of female futurity tied to Haitian independence, not biological reproduction. Ultimately, I argue, “Theresa” transforms the cult of Mary, showing how the female body serves as an instrument of divine energies in which the final product is not a child but instead political sovereignty.

This chapter analyses the Tasmanian Journal of Natural Science (1841–1849), the first Australian scientific periodical. Although Lieutenant-Governor John Franklin was the journal’s patron, Jane Franklin used the Tasmanian Journal to pursue her interests in botanical science, domestic experiments with Indigenous children and educational reform. The Tasmanian Journal was a material record of the Franklins’ efforts to use science and education to change colonial culture. It reveals the scientific endeavours undertaken by local collectors and visiting scientists, and provides an insight into the scissors-and-paste construction of periodical publications. Notable contributors included the scientist and explorer Paul Strzelecki, the New Zealand missionary botanist William Colenso, the ornithologist John Gould and Dr Edmund Hobson who studied the platypus and, with his wife Margaret, identified marsupial megafauna fossils. Local collectors used science to further their social status, and local elites used scientific print culture to further their political and intellectual interests. Colonial and imperial politics intersected with scientific print culture, in which race, gender and knowledge played complicated roles. Alongside the scientific journal, colonial newspapers and Indigenous letter writers and petitioners from Flinders Island used Tasmania’s distinctive print culture to raise pressing questions about colonial governance, Indigenous welfare and the settler colonial public sphere.

The introduction showcases colonial officials, missionaries and natural history collectors who, alongside Indigenous interlocutors and metropolitan advocates, sought to collect and use Antipodean information. Three key fields of knowledge emerged from the Australian colonies, and they reveal the relationship between knowledge formation and print culture. Part 1, Imagining Settler Humanitarianism, examines key debates about convictism, race and morality. Part 2, Regulating Settler Society, focuses on convictism and the forms of knowledge about reforming the self and regulating society that emerged from penal experiments. Part 3, Inventing Settler Science, shows how the scientific novelty of the Australian colonies attracted attention from the Endeavour voyage onwards, and inaugurated networks of correspondence, collection and publication that struggled to account for the Indigenous knowledge and participation that characterised the colonies.

This chapter examines eighteenth-century textual records about the Australian colonies, from the early British press reports of the establishment of the penal colony at Port Jackson to the accounts of religious personnel such as the first colonial chaplain Richard Johnson. It reveals how convicts and Indigenous people were represented in texts designed for metropolitan audiences. The isolated voices of evangelical reformers provided rich accounts of the problems and failures of the penal colony. They questioned the morality of the military governance of the penal colony and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Evangelical accounts from New South Wales became part of a global knowledge economy and a thriving print culture; they provided evidence that thickened, and at times contradicted, official accounts that circulated in the British media.

The conclusion draws together the threads of the three key fields of colonial knowledge and shows some of the later trajectories of these rich archives. Australian data proved central to key ideas that were fomented during the nineteenth century, and which continue to affect contemporary society. Debates about civilisational orders, and about the role of science and religion in relation to the extension of imperial power and economic privilege, were widespread. The distinctive nature of the Australian colonial experiment continues to make important contributions to global debates about the history of humanitarianism and human rights, apologies and reparations sought by colonised and displaced peoples for the wrongs of imperialism and colonial governance, and the uneven distribution of wealth, up to the twenty-first century.

This chapter analyses the diverse textual sources emanating from Norfolk Island, which were captured in colonial and imperial archives, to explore how metropolitan ideas could be trialled in remote colonial Australian locales, brought into metropolitan inquiries, then circulated through imperial print culture. Ambitious and curious men such as Alexander Maconochie saw the Australian colonies as opportunities for personal advancement and intellectual endeavour. He experimented with prison reform in Tasmania, then was appointed as Commandant at Norfolk Island, where he both implemented and wrote his new ‘mark system’ of prison management. On his return to Britain, Maconochie produced multiple publications promoting his scheme. He appeared before governmental inquiries to defend his reputation and extend his influence; and in so doing inaugurated many of the foundational modern principles of penology. Maconochie also encouraged prisoners to write, and thus a rich archive of convict memoirs emerged from Norfolk Island, including those by James Lawrence and William Henry Barber. These connected with progressive publishers, such as Thomas Chambers, and writers such as Charles Dickens, who included convict voices and narratives in their metropolitan publications and built public support for the end of transportation.