Overview

Paper and the Making of Early Modern Literature explores the crucial role of paper in the early history of books and of English literature. Taking up four paradigms of literary scholarship—authorship, composition, form, and reuse—Georgina Wilson shows how the material affordances of paper shaped the work of readers, writers, and critics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Looking past the surface of printed texts to less legible forms of labor, Wilson models literary critical readings of paper's physical aspects, from watermarks to rotatable paper dials, in Ben Jonson's Sejanus His Fall and George Wither's emblems, sheets, and fragments. Turning from paper's specific physical attributes to authors who were preoccupied with its imaginative potential, Wilson explores how paper's tangible qualities intervened in what readers and writers did with it, tracing formalist, legal, and political debates on the textual and nontextual uses of paper through the works of John Taylor and eighteenth-century ""it-narratives."" Drawing upon examples from early modern drama, poetry, and prose to consider the real and imagined women and men who made and used paper, Wilson demonstrates how early modern paper was both the product of embodied labor and of the early modern imagination. Bringing together close reading, critical bibliography, archival research, and literary theory, Paper and the Making of Early Modern Literature shows how paper makes literature not only as a physical object but also as a discipline.

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9781512827446

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Reviews

""This thoughtful and compelling book recovers the role that paper played in the material and imaginative formation of early modern literature and seeks to rethink entrenched critical paradigms within English literary studies.""-- ""Claire M. L. Bourne, Penn State University"" ""Paper and the Making of Early Modern Literature is a fantastic book that makes an important intervention in discussions of the material text, literary form, and the nature of the literary critical profession.""-- ""Helen Smith, University of York""

Author Information

Georgina Wilson is an early modern literary scholar specializing in material texts. Her work has been published in Criticism, The Oxford Handbook of the History of the Book in Early Modern England, and Inscription: The Journal of Material Text—Theory, Practice, History. She writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement.

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