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Using the lens of early modern social authorship and contemporary social media, this Element explores a new print genre popular in England at the end of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the periodical. Traditionally, literary history has focused on only one aspect, the periodical essay. This Element returns the periodical to its original, complex literary ecosystem as an ephemeral text competing for an emerging audience, growing out of a social authorship culture. It argues that the relationship between authors, publishers, and audiences in the early periodicals is a dynamic participatory culture, similar to what modern readers encounter in the early phases of the transition from print to digital, as seen in social media. Like our current evolving digital environment, the periodical also experienced a shift from its original practices stressing sociability to a more commercially driven media ecology. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This Element examines eighteenth-century manuscript forms, their functions in the literary landscape of their time, and the challenges and practices of manuscript study today. Drawing on both literary studies and book history, Levy and Schellenberg offer a guide to the principal forms of literary activity carried out in handwritten manuscripts produced in the first era of print dominance, 1730-1820. After an opening survey of sociable literary culture and its manuscript forms, numerous case studies explore what can be learned from three manuscript types: the verse miscellany, the familiar correspondence, and manuscripts of literary works that were printed. A final section considers issues of manuscript remediation up to the present, focusing particularly on digital remediation. The Element concludes with a brief case study of the movement of Phillis Wheatley's poems between manuscript and print. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

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Early English Periodicals and Early Modern Social Media

How and Why to Do Things with Eighteenth-Century Manuscripts

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2 results

Early English Periodicals and Early Modern Social Media

How and Why to Do Things with Eighteenth-Century Manuscripts