The songbooks of the 1830-40s were printed in tiny numbers, and small format so they could be hidden in a pocket, passed round or thrown away. Collectors have sought ‘these priceless chapbooks’, but only recently a collection of 49 songbooks has come to light. This collection represents almost all of the known songbooks from the period.
This book offers a new history and theory of modern celebrity. It argues that celebrity is a cultural apparatus that emerged in response to the Romantic industrialization of print and culture. It investigates the often strained interactions of artistic endeavour and commercial enterprise, and the place of celebrity culture in history of the self.
These four volumes collect the works of eleven poets writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Volume 1 presents two collections by Mary E. Tucker Lambert--Loew's Bridge, A Broadway Idyl, a poet's-eye view of lower Manhattan just after the Civil War, and Poems--and Infelicia, a dramatic work by the notorious Adah Isaacs Menken. Volumes 2, 3, and 4 contain works by nine other poets, all of which were published between 1895 and 1910, a particularly brutal era for blacks. But, surprisingly, only one of these women (Lizelia Moorer) protests the treatment of her race during this period of social upheaval and injustice. The remaining eight poets all conformed to the ethos of most black writers of the time, "whitewashing" their art while educating and uplifting their people. Their themes are traditional--love, nature, death, Christian idealism and morality, and family--and are for the most part couched in conventional forms and language. As interesting for the themes that they address as for those that they ignore, these selections offer a unique sampling of poetic voices that, until now, have gone largely unheard.