This book is a study of depictions of health and sickness in the early American novel, 1787-1808. These texts reveal a troubling tension between the impulse toward social affection that built cohesion in the nation and the pursuit of self-interest that was considered central to the emerging liberalism of the new Republic. Good health is depicted as an extremely positive social value, almost an a priori condition of membership in the community. Characters who have the “glow of health” tend to enjoy wealth and prestige; those who become sick are burdened by poverty and debt or have made bad decisions that have jeopardized their status. Bodies that waste away, faint, or literally disappear off of the pages of America’s first fiction are resisting the conditions that ail them; as they plead for their right to exist, they draw attention to the injustice, apathy, and greed that afflict them.
This book is a study of depictions of health and sickness in the early American novel, 1787-1808. These texts reveal a troubling tension between the impulse toward social affection that built cohesion in the nation and the pursuit of self-interest that was considered central to the emerging liberalism of the new Republic. Good health is depicted as an extremely positive social value, almost an a priori condition of membership in the community. Characters who have the “glow of health” tend to enjoy wealth and prestige; those who become sick are burdened by poverty and debt or have made bad decisions that have jeopardized their status. Bodies that waste away, faint, or literally disappear off of the pages of America’s first fiction are resisting the conditions that ail them; as they plead for their right to exist, they draw attention to the injustice, apathy, and greed that afflict them.
The first biography of Asenath Nicholson, Compassionate Stranger recovers the largely forgotten history of an extraordinary woman. Trained as a school teacher, Nicholson was involved in the abolitionist, temperance, and diet reforms of the day before she left New York in 1844 “to personally investigate the condition of the Irish poor.” She walked alone throughout nearly every county in Ireland and reported on conditions in rural Ireland on the eve of the Great Irish Famine. She published Ireland’s Welcome to the Stranger, an account of her travels in 1847. She returned to Ireland in December 1846 to do what she could to relieve famine suffering—first in Dublin and then in the winter of 1847–48 in the west of Ireland where the suffering was greatest. Nicholson’s precise, detailed diaries and correspondence reveal haunting insights into the desperation of victims of the Famine and the negligence and greed of those who added to the suffering. Her account of the Great Irish Famine, Annals of the Famine in Ireland in 1847, 1848 and 1849, is both a record of her work and an indictment of official policies toward the poor: land, employment, famine relief. In addition to telling Nicholson’s story, from her early life in Vermont and upstate New York to her better-known work in Ireland, Murphy puts Nicholson’s own writings and other historical documents in conversation. This not only contextualizes Nicholson’s life and work, but it also supplements the impersonal official records with Nicholson’s more compassionate and impassioned accounts of the Irish poor.
The Chronology and Calendar of Documents relating to the London Book Trade 1641-1700 presents abstracts of documents relating to the book trade and book production between 1641 and 1700. It brings together in one sequence edited abstracts of entries referring to named books, printers, and booksellers selected from the manuscripts of the Stationers' Company Court Books; all references to printing, publishing, bookselling, and the book trade occurring in major historical printed sources (Calendar of State Papers Domestic; the Journals of the Houses of Lords and Commons; Reports of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts) ; and entries for contemporary pamphlets. The labour records of the printing and bookselling trades probably represent the fullest account of any work force in early modern England and the printed products of the trade survive in such great numbers that they enable us to examine them for evidence not only of who made and sold them but also of how they were made. These volumes constitute a reference work of importance not only for literature specialists, bibliographers, and historians of book production but also for economic, social, and political historians. Not only do they bring together records from a variety of separate printed sources, thereby making explicit their interconnections, but also they make accessible some less well-known manuscript sources, notably from the Stationers' Company archives. Most importantly the Chronology and Calendar extends the earlier work of Arber, Greg, and Jackson on the earlier seventeenth century. As a chronological sequence the volumes meet the need for a preliminary narrative history of the trade in the later seventeenth century; and the provision of title, name, and topic indexes renders this an indispensable reference tool for research into the social, political, and economic contexts of the book trade, its personnel, and its printed output.
This title was first published in 2001. Literary critics, textual editors and bibliographers, and historians of publishing have hitherto tended to publish their research as if in separate fields of enquiry. The purpose of this volume is to bring together contributions from these fields in a dialogue rooted in the transmission of texts. Arranged chronologically, so as to allow the use of individual sections relevant to period literature courses, the book offers students and teachers a set of essays designed to reflect these approaches and to signal their potential for fruitful integration. Some of the essays answer the demand "Show me what literary critics (or textual editor; or book historians) do and how they do it", and stand as examples of the different concerns, methodologies and strategies employed. Others draw attention to the potential of the approaches in combination.
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