Studies in Ephemera

Kevin D. Murphy is professor and executive officer in the Ph.D. Program in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Jonathan Fisher of Blue Hill,Maine: Commerce, Culture, and Communityon the Eastern Frontier (2010), as well as articles on nineteenth- and twentieth century subjects in the Journal of theSociety of Architectural Historians, the Winterthur Portfolio, and the Journal ofUrban History.Sally O’Driscoll is teaches English at Fairfield University. Her work on eighteenth-century literature and culture has appeared in such journals as Signs, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, and Eighteenth-Century: Theory andInterpretation.

• Illustrations Acknowledgments 1Introduction. "Fugitive Pieces" and "Gaudy Books:" Textual, Historical, and Visual Interpretations of Ephemera in the Long Eighteenth Century Kevin D. Murphy and Sally O’DriscollPart I: Definitions and Categorizations2Of Grubs and Other Insects: Constructing the Categories of “Ephemera” and “Literature” in Eighteenth-Century British Writing Paula McDowell3Digitizing Ephemera and Its Discontents: EBBA’s Quest to Capture the Protean Broadside Ballad Patricia Fumerton4What Gets Printed from Oral Tradition: Anna Gordon's Ephemeral Ballads Ruth Perry5Approaches to Ephemera: Scottish Broadsides, 1679-1746 Adam Fox6Ephemera at the American Antiquarian Society: Perspectives on Commercial Life in the Long Eighteenth Century Georgia BarnhillPart II: Text and Image7Making Sense of Broadside Ballad Illustrations in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Alexandra Franklin8“A Battleground Around the Crime:” The Visuality of Execution Ephemera and Its Cultural Significances in Late Seventeenth-Century EnglandTara Burk9From “The Easter Wedding” to “The Frantick Lover:” The Repeated Woodcut and Its Shifting Roles Theodore Barrow10What Kind of Man Do the Clothes Make? Print Culture and the Meanings of Macaroni Effeminacy Sally O’DriscollBibliography IndexAbout the Contributors

This collection of essays contributes to a reassessment of eighteenth-century materials not intended to be preserved. The editors’ goal to 'bring a new scholarly vision and increased attention to ephemeral works' is achieved. . . .These essays survey rich resources which allow us to glimpse a world of rapid publishing and jobbing printing that rarely appear in surveys of eighteenth-century literature. As others have shown, such efforts are especially important when most national short-title catalogues and many digitized collections feature books, periodicals and pamphlets but exclude a vast terrain of items printed using a single sheet of paper.