The Scrapbook in American Life
The Scrapbook in American Life

Author: Susan Tucker

Publisher: Temple University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 9781592134786

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This book explores the history of scrapbook-making, its origins, uses, changing forms and purposes as well as the human agents behind the books themselves. Scrapbooks bring pleasure in both the making and consuming - and are one of the most enduring yet simultaneously changing cultural forms of the last two centuries. Despite the popularity of scrapbooks, no one has placed them within historical traditions until now. This volume considers the makers, their artefacts, And The viewers within the context of American culture. The volume's contributors do not show the reader how to make scrapbooks or improve techniques but instead explore the curious history of what others have done in the past and why these splendid examples of material and visual culture have such a significant place in many households.

Encyclopedia of Ephemera
Encyclopedia of Ephemera

Author: Michael Twyman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-10-24

Total Pages: 1322

ISBN-13: 113678778X

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The joy of finding an old box in the attic filled with postcards, invitations, theater programs, laundry lists, and pay stubs is discovering the stories hidden within them. The paper trails of our lives -- or ephemera -- may hold sentimental value, reminding us of great grandparents. They chronicle social history. They can be valuable as collectibles or antiques. But the greatest pleasure is that these ordinary documents can reconstruct with uncanny immediacy the drama of day-to-day life. The Encyclopedia of Ephemera is the first work of its kind, providing an unparalleled sourcebook with over 400 entries that cover all aspects of everyday documents and artifacts, from bookmarks to birth certificates to lighthouse dues papers. Continuing a tradition that started in the Victorian era, when disposable paper items such as trade cards, die-cuts and greeting cards were accumulated to paste into scrap books, expert Maurice Rickards has compiled an enormous range of paper collectibles from the obscure to the commonplace. His artifacts come from around the world and include such throw-away items as cigarette packs and crate labels as well as the ubiquitous faxes, parking tickets, and phone cards of daily life. As this major new reference shows, simple slips of paper can speak volumes about status, taste, customs, and taboos, revealing the very roots of popular culture.

The Part and the Whole in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art
The Part and the Whole in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art

Author: Matthew Pethers

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2024-04-12

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1684485096

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The essays in this pathbreaking collection consider the significance of varied early American fragmentary genres and practices—from diaries and poetry, to almanacs and commonplace books, to sermons and lists, to Indigenous ruins and other material shards and fragments—often overlooked by critics in a scholarly privileging of the “whole.” Contributors from literary studies, book history, and visual culture discuss a host of canonical and non-canonical figures, from Edward Taylor and Washington Irving to Mary Rowlandson and Sarah Kemble Knight, offering insight into the many intellectual, ideological, and material variations of “form” that populated the early American cultural landscape. As these essays reveal, the casting of the fragmentary as aesthetically eccentric or incomplete was a way of reckoning with concerns about the related fragmentation of nation, society, and self. For a contemporary audience, they offer new ways to think about the inevitable gaps and absences in our cultural and historical archive.

Woolfian Boundaries
Woolfian Boundaries

Author: Anna Burrells

Publisher: Clemson University Press

Published: 2023-12-15

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 163804127X

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Woolfian Boundaries explores Woolf’s work from perspectives “beyond the boundary” of her own positions and attitudes, taking her coolness toward the provinces and “prejudice” against the regional novel (Letters 6: 381) as the starting point for considering her writing in the light of its own “limits,” self-declared and otherwise. Chapter topics range from Woolf’s connections with the “Birmingham School” of novelists in the 1930s to her interests in environmentalism, portraiture, photography, and the media, and her endlessly fascinating relationship with the writings of her contemporaries and predecessors.

Text Types and the History of English
Text Types and the History of English

Author: Manfred Görlach

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2008-08-22

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 3110197162

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The history of modern European languages has been largely determined by the range of functions they have acquired, particularly after 1500. This development necessitated a notable expansion of their syntax and lexis, but is most characteristically reflected in the conventionalization of text types. Starting from the German concept of Textsorte as developed from the 1960s onwards, the present account is a first comprehensive attempt at charting the field for the history and present-day situation of the English language. In text types, a designation is linked with a more or less stable form which guides the writer’s production as well as the reader's expectation, permitting one to recognize straightforward uses as well as deliberate misuses. Some two thousand of such designations are here listed with minimal definitions and dates for first occurrences. The discussion then concentrates on selected types, which are seen as especially illustrative for English: book dedications, cooking recipes, advertisements, church hymns, lexical entries, and jokes. Their functions and development over time are treated in correlation with their specific linguistic characteristics and adaptations to different period styles and social changes in the readership. The functional range of text types in traditions outside England and the consequences of the export of English categories are exemplified by the history of Scots/Scottish English and of English in India. The arguments are accompanied by a lavish supply of textual excerpts and more than fifty pages of facsimiles, which are especially relevant for insights derived from typographical features. A full bibliography and indices are provided at the end. The book will prove useful for decisions on the constitution of representative text corpora and stimulate research into a greater number of individual text types as well as contrastive analyses at least among European languages.

Waste Paper in Early Modern England
Waste Paper in Early Modern England

Author: Anna Reynolds

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-03-05

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 019888270X

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Waste Paper in Early Modern England argues that rhetorical commonplaces referring to waste paper are indicative of everyday, material experience - of an author's, reader's, housewife's, or city-dweller's immersion in an environment brimming with repurposed scraps and sheets.