Literary Coteries and the Making of Modern Print Culture offers the first study of manuscript-producing coteries as an integral element of eighteenth-century Britain's literary culture. As a corrective to literary histories assuming that the dominance of print meant the demise of a vital scribal culture, the book profiles four interrelated and influential coteries, focusing on each group's deployment of traditional scribal practices, on key individuals who served as bridges between networks, and on the aesthetic and cultural work performed by the group. The book also explores points of intersection between coteries and the print trade, whether in the form of individuals who straddled the two cultures; publishing events in which the two media regimes collaborated or came into conflict; literary conventions adapted from manuscript practice to serve the ends of print; or simply poetry hand-copied from magazines. Together, these instances demonstrate how scribal modes shaped modern literary production. This title is also available as Open Access.

The first examination of interconnected manuscript-exchanging coteries as an integral element of literary culture in eighteenth-century Britain. This title is also available as Open Access.

This book is about the literary and friendship networks that were active in Britain for a 250 year period. Patterns in the nature of literary social circles emerge: they may centre upon a location, like Christ Church, or a person, like Aaron Hill; they may suffer stress when private relationships become public knowledge, as Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon shows; and they may model themselves on a preceding age, as the relationship between the Sidney circle and Lady Mary Wroth exemplifies. Despite these similarities, no two coteries are the same. The circles this volume examines even differ in their acceptance of their own status as a coterie: someone like Constance Fowler was certainly part of a strict familial coterie; the Scriberlians were a more informal set who were also members of other groups; and although Byron’s years of fame are regularly associated with Holland House, he often denied being of their party. With an Afterword by Helen Hackett

Print Culture, Agency, and Regionality in the Hand Press Period illuminates the diverse ways that people in the British regional print trades exerted their agency through interventions in regional and national politics as well as their civic, commercial, and cultural contributions. Works printed in regional communities were a crucial part of developing narratives of local industrial, technological, and ideological progression. By moving away from understanding of print cultures outside of London as ‘provincial’, however, this book argues for a new understanding of ‘region’ as part of a network of places, emphasising opportunities for collaboration and creation that demonstrate the key role of regions within larger communities extending from the nation to the emerging sense of globality in this period. Through investigations of the men and women of the print trades outside of London, this collection casts new light on the strategies of self-representation evident in the work of regional print cultures, as well as their contributions to individual regional identities and national narratives.

Highlights the centrality of non-canonical, middle-ranking women writers to the production of literature and culture in Britain, Ireland, Europe and Russia in the late eighteenth century. The Irish writers and editors Katherine (1773-1824) and Martha Wilmot (1775-1873) left a unique record of middle-ranking women's literary practices and experiences of travel in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Their manuscripts are notable for their vivid portrayal of the era's political conflicts, capturing a flight from Ireland during the Irish Rebellion (1798), time spent in Paris during the Peace of Amiens (1801-03), and extended residences in Russia during the Napoleonic Wars. However, in their accounts of these key European events, the Wilmots' manuscripts, and published work, showcase their participation in a startling range of self-educating activities, including travel writing, biography, antiquarianism, early ethnographic observation, language acquisition, translation practices and editorial work. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book explores the collaborative relationships formed by women participating in cosmopolitan networks beyond the typical locations of the Grand Tour. Across their travels, the sisters met, engaged with, and learned from numerous key women of the time, including Princess Ekaterina Dashkova, Margaret King, Lady Mount Cashell and Helen Maria Williams. In this first full-length study to focus on the literary and cultural exchanges surrounding the Wilmot sisters, Wolf showcases how manuscript circulation, coterie engagement and transnational travel provided avenues for women to engage with the intellectual discourses from which they were often excluded.

'This book presents a rigorous, hugely informative analysis of the early history of Dutch children’s literature, pedagogical developments and emerging family formations. Thoroughly researched, Dietz’s study will be essential for historians of eighteenth-century childhood, education and children’s books, both in the Dutch context and more widely.’ — Matthew Grenby, Newcastle University, UK. ‘A rich, informative, well-documented and effectively illustrated discussion of the ways Dutch eighteenth-century educators tried to transform youth into responsible readers. It does so in a wide international context and masterfully connects this process to the radical politicization and de-politicization of Dutch society in the revolutionary period.’ —Wijnand W. Mijnhardt, formerly of Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and the University of California at Los Angeles, USA. This book explores how children’s literature and literacy could at once regulate and empower young people in the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic. Rather than presenting the history of childhood as a linear story of increasing agency, it suggests that we view it as a continuous struggle with the impossibility of full agency for young people. This volume demonstrates how this struggle informed the production of books in a historical context in which the development of independent youths was high on the political agenda. In close interaction with international children’s literature markets, Dutch authors developed new strategies to make the members of young generations into capable readers and writers, equipped to organize their own minds and bodies properly, and to support a supposedly declining fatherland.

Providing a broad, definitive account of how the 'archival turn' in humanities scholarship has shaped modernist studies, this book also functions as an ongoing 'practitioner's toolkit' (including useful bibliographical resources) and a guide to avenues for future work. Archival work in modernist studies has revolutionised the discipline in the past two decades, fuelled by innovative and ambitious scholarly editing projects and a growing interest in fresh types of archival sources and evidence that can re-contextualise modernist writing. Several theoretical trends have prompted this development, including the focus on compositional process within genetic manuscript studies, the emphasis on book history, little magazines, and wider publishing contexts, and the emphasis on new material evidence and global and 'non-canonical' authors and networks within the 'New Modernist Studies'. This book provides a guide to the variety of new archival research that will point to fresh avenues and connect the methodologies and resources being developed across modernist studies. Offering a variety of single-author case studies on recent archival developments and editing projects, including Samuel Beckett, Hart Crane, H.D., James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf, it also offers a range of thematic essays that examine an array of underused sources as well as the challenges facing archival researchers of modernism