Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2022
Department
English
Abstract
The title of Rachael Scarborough King’s edited collection of essays, After Print, refers at once to Peter Stallybrass’s insight that printing is a provocation of manuscript, as well as to what the study of manuscripts looks like when we move away from stadial and supersessionist print culture paradigms of authorship and publication and instead embrace archival methods and interpretive approaches that center on concepts of media interrelation in early modern manuscript cultures, such as Margaret Ezell’s concept of social authorship.The essays in King’s collection, including an epilogue by Ezell herself, bear the fruits of such intermedial and transmedial approaches, bringing into relief what King terms “the multimedia eighteenth century.” King argues that such methods and theories demonstrate the importance of what Siegfried Zielinksi has called an “archeological” approach that focuses study on moments when, as Zielinksi puts it, “things and situations were still in state of flux, where the options for development in various directions were still wide open, where the future was conceivable as holding multifarious possibilities of technical and cultural solutions for constructing media worlds.”
Original Publication Information
Mattes, M.A. (2022). Toward an Archaeology of Manuscripts. Eighteenth-Century Studies 55(4), 545-552.
ThinkIR Citation
Mattes, Mark A., "Toward an Archaeology of Manuscripts" (2022). Faculty Scholarship. 842.
https://ir.library.louisville.edu/faculty/842
DOI
10.1353/ecs.2022.0035
ORCID
0000-0002-6490-3693
Included in
American Literature Commons, Book and Paper Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons, Other Film and Media Studies Commons
Comments
This review essay was originally published in Eighteenth-Century Studies, volume 55, issue 4 in 2022.