Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture

Leah Price is Professor of English at Harvard University. She is the author of The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel and contributes regularly to The London Review of Books; she is working on two books, Novel Media and The Stenographic Imagination. Pamela Thurschwell is Lecturer in English at University College London. She is the author of Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920 and Sigmund Freud, and co-editor of The Victorian Supernatural.

• Contents: Introduction: invisible hands, Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell; Speech on paper: Charles Dickens, Victorian phonography, and the reform of writing, Ivan Kreilkamp; Stenographic masculinity, Leah Price; The body types: corporeal documents and body politics circa 1900, Victoria Olwell; Dictation anxiety: the stenographer's stake in Dracula, Jennifer L. Fleissner; Secretary to the stars: mediums and the agency of authorship, Bette London; The case of the capable fingers: a Della Street mystery, Daniel Karlin; Bodies that mattered: technology, embodiment, and secretarial mediation, Douglas A. Brooks; Bibliography; Index.

'... the articles provide a much needed corrective to the critical tendency to represent the new systems for the sending, storing, and retrieving of data as the driving force in the transition from an industrial to knowledge economy... The results will be of interest not only to those concerned with the representation of laboring bodies in popular literature and culture, but with what it means to live at a time in which information is not so much a means of understanding the world as it is a kind of universal currency, the value of which demands the effacement of the manual labor of which it is a product... valuable collection of essays.' Victorian Studies