Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Reprinting and the Embodied Book

Jessica DeSpain is Associate Professor of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, USA.

• Contents: Introduction: steaming across the pond: books, bodies, and citizenship in 19th-century transatlantic culture; ’Here goes Boz - only a shilling!’: the monstrous general circulation of American Notes; Claiming kindred with all the world: Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World and its British reprints; Restaging intimacy: the pamphlet reproductions of Fanny Kemble’s Georgian journal; Whitman’s democratic marrow: Democratic Vistas within a British working class cheap series; Conclusion: the transatlantic book after international copyright: the arts and crafts respond to an Anglo-American alliance; Bibliography; Index.

"Jessica DeSpain brings together an intriguing combination of works by Charles Dickens, Susan Warner, Fanny Kemble, and Walt Whitman to produce a rich understanding of the culture of reprinting. The result is a thought-provoking and informative exploration of reprinting and textual adaptation in a transatlantic context."- Christine Bold, University of Guelph, Canada, author of The Frontier Club: Popular Westerns and Cultural Power, 1880-1924 "The virtue of this book is that it links the transatlantic packaging of nineteenth-century books to the transatlantic interest in the body. ... the execution is superb."- Review 19"DeSpain’s Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Reprinting and the Embodied Book will surely be a touchstone of future scholarship on textual studies, cultural materialism, and nineteenth-century literary culture. Her close, critical reading of texts – paired with her archival research and reproduced artwork – articulate a deep historical concern about modality and materiality that persists today, and her monograph contributes to an ever-expanding field of study where DeSpain’s voice is sure to find its audience."- Michael James Griffin II, Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA