This chapter considers some of the earliest writers in the Black literary tradition in order to explore the limitations of print publication. Books by James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Phillis Wheatley, and John Marrant were funded by proslavery British evangelicals associated with Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon. As she was publishing Black authors, Huntingdon also invested huge sums in the African slave trade and enslaved dozens of people on her plantation in Georgia. I argue that Huntingdon’s patronage helps explain troubling opinions about slavery voiced by the writers she promoted, most notoriously those in Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” The chapter compares books like Wheatley’s with the writings of an unknown Black writer also associated with Huntingdon: the preacher David Margrett. Huntingdon funded Margrett on a missionary trip to Georgia but fired him after he gave a radical antislavery sermon declaring that “God will deliver his own people from slavery.” Margrett’s sermon survives only in private letters written by white people who sought to silence him. Comparing Margrett’s unpublished sermon with the books Huntingdon promoted illuminates the pressures Black authors strategically faced when they argued for their humanity in a medium controlled by white patrons.

This chapter explores how the NAACP’s Crisis, the National Urban League’s Opportunity, Abbott’s Monthly and Challenge/New Challenge are representative of the more palpable literary focus on the experiences of the working classes and the poor that occurs in 1930s Black print culture. Along with novels, volumes of poetry, and coverage in the Black press more generally, these literary journals and magazines published explicit depictions of African Americans’ social conditions. As instances of how the New Negro reader of the Harlem Renaissance was recast throughout the decade, The Crisis, Opportunity, Abbott’s Monthly, and Challenge/New Challenge often targeted African Americans as working subjects and intended readers. As the chapter illustrates, the sections of literature, book reviews, editorials/criticism, and correspondence comprising these literary journalsʼ and magazinesʼ 1930s content allowed editors and writers to engage in work that both prioritized literary portrayals of African Americans’ inner lives as maids, cooks, day laborers, and the unemployed and expanded audiences for their developing literary tradition.

This essay looks at satires of the literary marketplace written by three non-elite female poets: Mary Barber (1685–1755), Mary Jones (1707–78), and Elizabeth Hands (1746–1815). Writing outside the urban marketplace and living with heightened financial precarity, these women did not market their volumes directly in a London commercial space. Rather, these poets sold their collections by subscription, cultivating potential patrons, subscribers, and readers through personal connections across provincial, non-London networks. Their rich satires draw on the keenly felt challenges of attracting a sufficient number of subscribers, a process that essentially moves the public literary marketplace into more private, often domestic, space shaped by individual relationships and social networks. A distinctly different kind of literary satire results, one focused on private interactions, particular utterances, and domestic gatherings. This essay examines satiric poems by Barber, Jones, and Hands, and suggests that the female poet’s perspective gained from their proximity produces effective satire both of the specific individuals the women encounter and of the cultural attitudes those individuals represent. Within the very material object marking these women’s success – the published volume in the reader’s hands – these four verse satires document the precarity of their situation and their perilous path to publication by subscription.

The Introduction situates the book within the theoretical parameters of Cultural Memory Studies, Print Culture Studies and British Studies. It provides a short history of Memory Studies, focusing on Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) as well as Aleida Assmann’s, Astrid Erll’s and Ann Rigney’s focus on media and memory. It surveys the complex media ecology of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, arguing that the role that printed texts played in articulating sites of memory changed between 1688 and 1745 as the meaning of print itself changed in relation to oral and manuscript cultures. It compares the media environments of the beginning and end of this period by focusing on the creation and circulation of two documents – the Declaration of William of Orange (1688) and the Particulars of the Victory regarding the Battle of Culloden (1746). The Introduction concludes by suggesting that Michael Rothberg’s concept of noeuds de mémoire (knots of memory) provides a useful model for examining printed works of British national memory in the mid-eighteenth century.

Chapter 1 begins by comparing Gilbert Burnet’s focus on the song “Liliburlero” as the media event of the 1688 Revolution with what contemporary scholars have written about the importance of printed works at the time. It asserts the importance of adopting a multi-media perspective on the 1688 Revolution. It analyzes James II/VII’s shifting use of media in the context of challenges to his throne by the Duke of Monmouth and the Earl of Argyll in 1685 and William of Orange in 1688. It assesses William’s Declaration outlining “the Reasons Inducing him, to Appear in Armes in the Kingdome of England” and suggests that the document gained its authority as a printed text by being represented in oral and manuscript forms. It concludes by suggesting that the initial mediation of the 1688 Revolution impacted its later re-inscription as a site of “Glorious” cultural memory when William’s Declaration was reprinted in early eighteenth-century histories of recent events such as those by Edmund Bohun and Abel Boyer.

The growth of consumption in the eighteenth century helped produce new cultural practices associated with the Enlightenment. Books were a special sort of consumer good. Their proliferation and variety encouraged multiple modes of reading that changed the relationship not only between reader and text but between self and society. While novels invited “intensive reading” and encouraged the belief in an inner emotional world, books, newspapers, and ephemeral literature stimulated “extensive reading” and the formation of a vibrant public sphere. Although the public sphere was not as bourgeois, rational, and oppositional as Jürgen Habermas claimed, the circulation of print did broaden and intensify public discussion of reformist projects. Consumption also shaped Enlightenment sociability. The material environments of Enlightenment sites of sociability facilitated socio-intellectual interaction. Men and women ate meals at salons, sipped coffee at cafés, and sported new fashions in public gardens, giving rise to robust conversational publics. Such polite sociability softened social hierarchies insofar as it created a broad cultural elite among the nobility and certain professional groups, but it also created new forms of exclusion on the basis of wealth and property. Although plebeian sociability sometimes intersected with that of elites, it often unfolded in the separate arenas of the tavern, street, and marketplace. Gender, too, remained a vector of exclusion, though wealthier women devised ways to participate in salons and attend public gatherings.

Chicago, in the late nineteenth century, gained part of its identity through the newspaper columns of Eugene Field, Finley Peter Dunne, and George Ade. They skewered the faults of what they called “Porkopolis,” yet they also depicted the city’s vitalism, brashness, and energy, and the rise of museums, the opera, and the symphony. Always, however, they returned to the common man and woman, particularly new arrivals, be they from nearby Indiana or Italy. Dunne’s literary spokesperson, the Irish bartender Mr. Dooley, held forth from his counter on Archey Road. Field, whose column “Sharps and Flats” delighted in satire, became famous as a children’s poet and playwright, while Ade’s Chicago types, such as Artie Blanchard, Pink Marsh, and Doc Horne, were praised for their ability to capture a new urban vernacular. His “Fables in Slang” earned him the title of the “American Aesop.” By holding a critical but loving mirror up to their metropolis, this trio helped forge an urban personality and a shared sense of communal pride and direction; simultaneously, they participated in the growing trend toward literary realism, local color, and the early formation of modernist prose.

This chapter addresses examples of African American autobiography published before the Civil War that both called for and complicated the concept of a Black community, narratives not about the journey from slavery to freedom but about the story of a tenuous freedom and an uncertain community, a collective story under development and in need of a proper telling. Many of these autobiographies speak of platforms built, of relations established, of communities forged; others speak of the need for such platforms, the absence of immediate relations, the longing for community. What they all share, however, is the commitment to telling a different story about Black life and ambition than the one that was all but required of African Americans at the time, the story of suffering under slavery.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), which has appeared in more than four hundred editions, is one of the most enduring and widely available African American texts. More than three dozen editions of the book have appeared in print since 1990. The variety of editions includes an ever-expanding body of paratexts such as chronologies, notes, bibliographies, and study guides, which reveal the extent to which publishers, editors, and scholars continually redesign Douglass’s book for new generations of readers. Investigations of Narrative editions and paratexts enhance views of one of our most well-known writers and books.

Chapter 3 departs from the Colombian Pacific and ventures to the eastern Andean highland town of Cúcuta, where white slaveholding delegates from across Gran Colombia (and one from Mexico) established the policy of gradual emancipation. After surveying historical precedents for and factors leading up to the 1821 gradual emancipation law’s adoption, including Antioquia’s gradual abolition law of 1814 and the Haitian Revolution, the chapter turns to the contentious debate over the Free Womb law and the question of slaveholders’ compensation. Delegates principally wrestled over the age at which Free Womb children’s bondage would be terminated and over the parameters of their salability, grounding arguments in Enlightenment thought and colonial racial accounting ideas of the development life cycles of enslaved people. Here I also examine the debates and conditions for the trafficking of Free Womb children, a phenomenon I refer to as the Free Womb trade that adopted specific legal parameters regarding puberty and geography. The chapter ends by exploring the combative and regionalized public spheres of abolition and antiabolition that developed across Gran Colombia in the 1820s.

This essay surveys the literate culture of the antebellum and Civil War eras among marginal southerners – African Americans, both free and enslaved, and poor and middle-class whites – and explores examples of the ways reading and writing, though quite distinct in formal pedagogies, blended together in the literary lives of the self-educated. Focused especially on Basil Armstrong Thomasson, a yeoman farmer in North Carolina whose diary records his reading practices as well as original verse, and John M. Washington, a Virginia man who kept a diary while enslaved, the essay presents a study in the surprising complexity and variegation of the textual landscape such people inhabited and helped create. It also discusses the scarcer archival traces of the literacy practices of ordinary southern women.

This chapter is about sensibility, which is the term that was commonly used in the second half of the eighteenth century to refer to a special capacity to respond with sensitivity to one’s environment. Colloquially understood as the heightened responsiveness of feeling or emotion, sensibility – in cultural, literary, artistic, historical, social, philosophical, and political contexts – reached far beyond what either of these more familiar terms convey. Eighteenth-century thinking about sensibility, in all of its complexity, remains deeply relevant to twenty-first century theories of affect, feeling, and emotion, and provides robust resources for, and in some cases correctives to, current theoretical and philosophical thought.

The Colored Co-operative Publishing Company is known for launching the literary career of Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. Not only did it publish her first novel, Contending Forces (1900); it also published the Colored American Magazine, which Hopkins contributed to and edited. Few people know of the Colored Co-operative’s other publishing initiatives, however. This chapter explores the publication history of Ellen Wetherell’s In Free America; or, Tales from North and South (1901), the only other bound book published by the Colored Co-operative besides Contending Forces. Wetherell was a white woman from Lynn, Massachusetts. Before she rose to prominence in her local Socialist Party, she self-published an anti-lynching pamphlet and then expanded and published it as a book through the Colored Co-operative. I argue the publication of this book marks a critical moment of transition and fluidity in African American literary history, for it marks the moment when a Black publisher took deliberate, concrete steps to expand its sphere of influence beyond the Black community, and by empowering a local white author to find her national voice, the company claimed power for itself.

The first chapter of this book puts League political thought into its immediate historical and publishing context, by way of an extended introduction to the range of material considered in the rest of this book. A distinction is established between demotic, polemical pamphleteering and the scholarly, juridical and theological treatises produced in professional and academic circles, as well as the genres in between, in order to analyse the political thought of the movement in all its registers.

Derrick Spires’s “Sketching Black Citizenship on Installment after the Fifteenth Amendment” asks how the literature of citizenship looked for African Americans who simultaneously celebrated a new relation to the state and recognized ongoing white supremacy, both North and South. Using the Fifteenth Amendment, Frances Harper’s period literary work, and practices of Black serial publication in Reconstruction as anchors, it theorizes “reconstruction on installment,” individual moments significant in their own right but also constituting a to-be-completed story. Recognizing that Black print called on Black citizens not only to read widely but also to produce African American literature – literature by Black people, about Black people, and for Black readers of all sorts – it reads, in addition to diverse work by Harper, texts by Mary Shadd Cary, William Steward, Cordelia Ray, and William Still. The chapter thus develops an interpretive theory of Black Reconstructions as process and practice, a way of thinking about and doing the work of citizenship rather than simply ranking it as achievement.

The material conditions of the years between 1800 and 1830 rendered Black authors and much of African American literature “out of bounds.” Contributors engage literature by people of African descent outside of slavery’s fetters, or Black cultural producers creating work deemed untoward, or literatures developed outside the covers of bound books. In this period, the idea of Black literature was plagued not only by prohibitions on literacy and circumscription on Black people’s mobility, but also by ambivalence about what in fact would have been acceptable public discourse for people of African descent. This volume explores African American literature that elided the suppression of African American thought by directly confronting the urgencies of the moment, especially themes related to the pursuit and the experience of freedom. Transitions in the social, political, and cultural conditions of the decades in question show themselves in literary production at the turn of the nineteenth century. This volume focuses on transitions in organizational life (section 1), in mobility (section 2), in print circulation (section 3), and in visual culture (section 4).

Cody Marrs’s “The Civil War in African American Memory” considers the ways in which African American writers in the wake of emancipation tried to answer the question “How should one remember a revolution that was never allowed to complete itself?” During Reconstruction, Marrs argues, two forms of emancipationist memory emerged. On the one hand, many African Americans saw the Civil War as a historical rupture, a break that required commemoration; on the other hand, many saw it as a historical link, part of a longer and enduring struggle for liberation. Marrs retraces how these views of the war took shape in African American life-writings, periodicals, poems, and speeches that used emancipationist memory to reframe the world remade by the Abolition War. That tendency to turn back to the past to apprehend the present, he argues, is the defining feature of African American memory of the war during this period, and it is what ultimately ties these two commemorative modes together, revealing the war to be both an act and a process, an event as well as an ongoing struggle.