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Recent scholarship on Black print cultures has paid close attention to self- and independent publication. These studies tend to center writer-publishers from the antebellum and Harlem Renaissance periods arguing that Black authors published their works out of either financial necessity or desire for editorial independence. However the causes and meanings of Black independent publishing changed during the postbellum pre-Renaissance period. In this essay I focus on Sutton E. Griggs and Oscar Micheaux two early twentieth-century novelists who labored outside of and in opposition to both the Black press and white mainstream publishers. Ultimately I argue that Griggs's and Micheaux's use of commission presses carved new paths for Black writers to dissent against emerging trends in political and literary culture: US expansionism and the early corporatization of literary publishing. This essay urges scholars to treat turn-of-the-century commission presses as neglected archives of radical texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over three decades ago, Robert Hill, the celebrated archivist and historian of the Universal Negro Improvement Association movement, argued that "the history of the audience is what's missing in the history of black radicalism." Building on Hill's provocation, this article theorizes modes of diasporic readership through the literature of the Jamaican communist and literary giant Claude McKay's novel Banjo. Through a close reading of two scenes in which the novel's characters engage in conversations about Black periodicals and embrace the contradictions within them, the article offers a provisional framework for exploring modes of readership and political education through print culture. Banjo must be read in part as an extension of McKay's political journalism and within his broader efforts to bridge Black nationalist and communist movements throughout the interwar period. Drawing on speculative and literary approaches to archival research, the article argues that the renewed emphasis on heterogeneity, ephemeral encounters, and place making depicted within Banjo can open up new lines of inquiry toward redressing the methodological challenges and textual silences surrounding the question of the audience and the study of radical print cultures within traditional archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sawt al-Thawra (Voice of the Revolution) was the weekly bulletin of the anticolonial revolutionary movement in Dhufar, Oman, in the 1970s. It was published in Aden beginning in 1972 by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG), or Jabhah al-Shaʻbīyah li-Taḥrīr ʻUmān wa-al-Khalīj al-ʻArabī in Arabic. This essay introduces the Sawt al-Thawra teaching tool, a resource that the author has created for the Revolutionary Papers project. It intends to supplement teaching and learning on the Dhufar Revolution, global history, anticolonialism and decolonization, social and political movements, and revolutionary print culture in the global 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay discusses how forms like political magazines, cultural journals, and party newspapers produced by twentieth-century anticolonial, left, and oppositional movements instituted practices of alternative pedagogy and political education across the Global South. These "revolutionary papers" served as a pedagogical infrastructure encompassing a critical curriculum drawn from ongoing movements, alternative histories, and regional literary production, to be used for collective practices of debate and inquiry. The essay introduces a series of digital teaching tools featured in the issue that study revolutionary periodicals such as the Cairo-based Afro-Asian literary magazine Lotus and underground pamphlets from the Mau Mau movement in Kenya. These teaching tools are accessible, interactive resources that provide archival, literary, and historical insights on movements and associated print cultures and are designed as pedagogical aids for the classroom and for political education in community settings. Along the way, the essay reflects on anticolonial periodicals as a resource for ongoing debates around decolonizing the university, and the possibilities presented by digital humanities approaches for the study of anticolonialism and Global South cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To this day, materials surrounding the 1974 Ethiopian Revolution that live in the archives of Addis Ababa University are designated as "clandestine literature." Their publication was a clandestine affair; critiquing the emperor of the then-oldest Christian kingdom in the world and eventually professing Marxist thinking, they amounted to blasphemy. However, building an argument for Ethiopian revolution was premised on another heretical proposition: that Ethiopia, world-famous for having eluded European colonial rule, was a client state of US imperialism during the mid-century age of decolonization. This article employs a selection of Ethiopian revolutionary papers—including magazines, newspapers, and journals produced and distributed across Ethiopia, North America, and Europe—to provide a genealogy of "US Imperialism in Ethiopia," a composite, hand-transcribed document of the late 1960s that has since been destroyed. Assembling materials marked by both their refutation of and proximity to US empire, this article argues that building the case for US imperialism in Ethiopia was a necessary step to clarify and link Ethiopian revolutionary struggle to anticolonialism. In the process, the article thinks with and extends the archival designation "clandestine" as both the conspiracy of alleging US imperialism in Ethiopia and an analytic for reading other transnational networks of revolutionary papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the independent newspaper Huli, published at the birth of the modern Hawaiian sovereignty movement from 1971 to 1973 by the grassroots political organization Kokua Hawaii. Reading through the surviving issues of Huli available in institutional archives, the article considers the variety of perspectives promoted within its pages to position Kokua Hawaii in relation to international understandings of anticolonial liberatory politics of the Global South. Revisiting prominent critiques of Kokua Hawaii, it argues that insights provided by Huli trouble lasting understandings of the organization and underscore the periodical's relevance for navigating rising waves of political struggle in Hawaiʻi today. Moreover, the article contends that Huli—a timely revival of Hawaiʻi's politically engaged print culture that flourished during the nineteenth century—offers one foundation for constructing a counterhegemonic lineage of socially concerned artists and cultural workers in Hawaiʻi. Through an analysis of Huli's content, imagery, and context of production, the article uses the name of the periodical and its call to "huli" as a means of tracking the influence of Kokua Hawaii's politics and aesthetics into the present, with Huli acting as a medium for insurgent inspiration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As with many Victorian novels, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) reflects and thematises society's obsession with material culture. This article investigates the contrasting ways in which books are appraised in Jane Eyre, arguing that patriarchal authority and its imposed vigilance over female bodies appear to be connected to the ways in which its characters engage with books. To unpack this argument, I propose a close reading of the novel's opening scene, in which John Reed confiscates Thomas Bewick's A History of British Birds (1797–1804) from Jane Eyre and reclaims it as his own. Further, I propose an analysis of the intertextual relationship between Jane Eyre and Anna Burns's Milkman (2018), a contemporary novel that posits the book as a contested object in the public space. In both novels, the protagonist/narrator finds in storytelling a way to circumvent the barriers placed over their access to books in early life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ch'oe Namsŏn was a key figure in the introduction of geography into the print media culture of early twentieth-century Chosŏn. Ch'oe used geography as a tool, creating a new territorial consciousness for national cohesion, and this article explores how this greatly shaped his poetic landscape. Locating itself between the boundaries of literary studies and cultural geography, this work looks at Ch'oe's underexplored T'aebaek poetry, in which his interests in geography, history, and national identity significantly converge. Drawing on "Mount Taebaek" of Korea's past, Ch'oe fashions the mountain into a pseudo-religious icon of nationhood. A symbolic landscape, evocative of a uniquely Korean past yet rising as a global icon going into a modern world, Ch'oe's poetry creates a godlike figure for the Korean people to look to in a changing time of imperialism, nationalism, and modern progress. Through various iterations of T'aebaek—benevolent deity, bringer of modernity, omnipotent ruler of the world—one sees the mountain play a vital role in the shaping of Ch'oe's nationalist project, which would have continued influence on his writings later in life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to show that the popular print sold and distributed during and after festive events, such as Carnival, had an impact on the commemoration and shaping of festive culture in early modern Italy. That is, the mass medium of print that had begun to shape European cultures, especially in Italy where Venice was one of Europe's first major printing centres, created festive pamphlets and small books that were attractive for individuals in various cities in Northern and Central Italy. This becomes apparent not only from the sources themselves but also from the connections that exist between these sources and historical and theatrical contexts. A study of popular print related to festive events addresses the most important criticisms of festival studies, namely that festivals were primarily local affairs, which would prevent researchers from making a meaningful contribution to festive culture studies on a larger scale. This article aims to overcome this by studying a selection of affordable pamphlets and small books, presenting the Carnivalesque text La guerra di Carnovale contro la Quaresima, which was intended for large audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the author's digital project an edition of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 's " Noctes Ambrosianae " series as a test case to explore the value of digital editions for better understanding Romantic print culture. The essay provides an overview of the project including the process of developing customized TEI typologies to capture different literary and cultural elements of the series. It argues that the process of digital editing should be considered a practice of critical making and affords deeper insights into the texts edited particularly when those texts emerge from a complex allusive print culture such as is found in Romantic periodicals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the influence of digital tools on the reception of Romanticism. The study is based on the digital edition of Polish poet Juliusz Słowacki's travel notebook from his journey to the East. The research demonstrates that a full reading of the fragmentary diary requires multidisciplinary work and that digital tools can integrate diverse approaches showcasing its fragmentary nature. Special attention is given to the specificity of Polish Romanticism and the need for new readings of Romantic works. Digital editions and popularization enable an interdisciplinary view of Romanticism revealing it as a multidimensional and attractive era for modern readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay discusses an online exhibit we are developing on Sarah Sophia Banks's collection of ephemera relating to the London Monster who attacked women in London between 1788 and 1790. Our exhibit contextualizes Banks's collections of print illustrations and clippings describing the Monster's attacks on white women amid the exploitation and rape of women of color across the British Empire. Bringing together scans from Banks's collections on the Monster alongside other illustrations on the topic from the Huntington Library our exhibit offers opportunities for uncovering relationships across these collections while examining colonialism and the nature of print culture in the Romantic era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers insight into the creation of a project-based graduate seminar that relied on collaboration play student agency and practice to understand the powerful Bigger 6 Global Romanticism movement. By deploying Digital Humanities pedagogy and minimal computing these first-generation students at a minority-serving institution began to understand that the literary voices heralding the Industrial Revolution and mechanization of print culture were immigrant non-white or female. The culminating digital project " The Bengal Annual: A Digital Exploration of Non-Canonical British Romantic Literature " explores what can be accomplished in a single semester as "itinerant entrepreneurs" of Digital Humanities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important reason for the success of the Venetian Paolo Sarpi's ideas in England is found in the 'Englishing' of his printed works, that is, their adaptation and appropriation by printers and translators. During the Venetian interdict (c. 1606–1608), Sarpi's tracts were treated as timely, informative, and politically useful news. Englishing consisted of re-writing titles by adding bombastic phrases, changing printers' ornaments, and adding marginalia to help readers unfamiliar with Italy. In the History of the Council of Trent, published in 1619 (Italian) and 1620 (English), the Englishing became more substantive – adding lengthy prefaces, inserting words into Sarpi's text, and including the translator's name. The prefaces framed the book's contents, while the translator's name provided authority. The additional words made the English History even more partisan than the Italian Historia. Publishers and translators modified Sarpi's works to produce aggressive readings that diverged from his own political and religious goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We combine unsupervised machine learning and econometric methods to study England's print culture in the pivotal sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Machine learning synthesizes the content of 57,863 texts comprising 83 million words into 110 topics. Topics include the expected, such as Natural Philosophy, and the unexpected, such as Baconian Theology. Timelines suggest that religious and political discourse gradually became less antagonistic and economic topics more prominent. The epistemology associated with Bacon was present in theological debates already before Bacon's epistemological contributions. Vector autoregression estimates provide insight into the coevolution of ideas on religion, science, and institutions. Innovations in religious ideas stimulated focus on science, especially at times when Puritanism was prominent in religious discourse. Neither science nor institutional thought evidence secularization. The Glorious Revolution and the Civil War did not spur debates on institutions nor did the founding of the Royal Society markedly elevate attention to science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Crucial to the Enlightenment', Roy Porter argued, was the work of 'critics, knowledge‐mongers, and opinion‐makers'; the critic was 'enlightened man incarnate'. In order to enhance our understanding of the ways in which exponents of print culture sought to orient public opinion and promote recognizably liberal principles and values, this article will examine both the polemical discourses of prolific literary journalists and the intellectual context of key issues, highlighting the work of the lawyer Owen Ruffhead. In often substantive commentaries, Ruffhead and his fellow critics referenced a distinctive set of natural law principles: they celebrated the norms of right reason, of equity and liberty. Amongst the values expounded in the Reviews were Lockean political precepts congruent with core features of liberal theory. From the mid‐eighteenth century, an early and unfamiliar 'liberal' vocabulary and agenda can be traced as civil liberties and rights were advocated, including the rights of the colonists, the underprivileged and the exploited. Decades before the term liberalism was devised, critics contributed to the shaping and diffusion of recognizably liberal patterns of thinking. Such an inquiry into a vibrant domain of ideas engages in ongoing historiographical debates, providing a new perspective on the formation and diffusion of influential ethical and socio‐political modes of thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article theorises the 'speculative anthology' as a formal experiment in futurity that challenges how anthologies have been used to publish, and promote, science fiction from the Global South in the international literary marketplace. It focuses on the 'Futures Past' series of anthologies published by Comma Press – Iraq+100 (2016), Palestine+100 (2019), Kurdistan+100 (2021), and Egypt+100 (2024) – in which indigenous writers are asked to imagine regional futures one century after a major historical event that has defined the pasts and presents of these existing, or aspiring, nation states. Building on recent scholarship in postcolonial print culture which has proposed new strategies for reading evolving genres of the anthology, I first consider the speculative anthology as a heterogeneous literary form which has the capacity to facilitate creative collaboration and collective forms of critique. At the same time, I show how such anthologies reveal a homogenising impulse, often rooted in national imaginaries, and can encourage an anthropological approach to literary writing, especially by minoritised authors. Reading across the paratextual infrastructures of the 'Futures Past' series, I then compare how individual anthologies are shaped by various speculative editorial and publishing practices. I conclude that this experiment in futurity undertakes meaningful, yet imperfect, speculative work as it imagines how writing about the future by authors from the Global South might be anthologised otherwise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper attempts to understand the idea of readership and access to printed books in colonial South India, responding to print and missionary interventions in nineteenth-century Kerala. The paper would ask, how does one work with traces of reading in the text and construct its beyond with interest in this history, paying heed to its entanglements in desires and fears of and from the same activity of reading? Is there a potential affective space in this history, accounted by the reader between divisions of the material text and the liminalities of reading events scattered in its time and space? The paper envisions methods to study reading and its lives by imaginatively and symbolically locating "readers" and "respondents" to the changes within the nineteenth-century missionary printing exercise. The study understands the coming of Vidyasamgraham or The Cottayam College Quarterly Magazine, published between 1864 and 1867 to have set the pace for both knowledge dissemination and the making of rational modern "reading" subjects in nineteenth-century Kerala. The serialization of The Slayer Slain throughout its eight issues will be read alongside the selected entries of Vidyasamgraham to ask questions about how reading was conceived, its locations, and the nature of the book. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1820s, Chile and Great Britain have shared a unique relationship that shaped the development of both countries and is still influential today. Despite their importance, however, the historical connections between Britain and Latin America are understudied. This essay analyzes the English-language periodical press published in nineteenth-century Chile, using the newspapers digitized by the authors' Anglophone Chile Newspaper Project (http://anglophonechile.org/news-archive/) to build on the bifocal post-colonial studies established by Fernando Coronil, the transatlantic and transdisciplinary model developed by Julio Ortega and the notion of the contact zone pioneered by Mary Louise Pratt. By tracing the Anglophone periodical press through three stages of development, from the colony's beginnings in commerce, through the era of informal empire, to the eventual hybridization of the Anglo colony with the local culture, the essay maps longstanding interrelations between the global north and south and illuminates the changing dynamics of informal empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores Wollstonecraft's experimental first novel, Mary: A Fiction (1788) in the context of Dissenting preoccupation with prejudice. It shows how Wollstonecraft shared the Dissenters' analysis that prejudice was the source of political and social oppression, and how she extended that insight into her account of the situation of women. She shared with Dissent a belief in education and in print culture as tools to combat prejudice, but her experimental textual strategies differ significantly from, for instance, that of Dissenter Anna Laetitia Barbauld, in her "Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts" (1790). Where Barbauld replicates in print the rhetorical strategies of public and political discourse, Wollstonecraft, in key moments in Mary, draws on the model, from Edward Young, of authentic, persuasive enthusiasm, to "steal into the soul" of her readers. Early in her writing career, she can thus be seen seeking to turn affective transport to political effect, and experimenting with the resources and registers of print culture to combat prejudice, and enact dissent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers selected book illustrations that were published in the 1530s by Augsburg printer Heinrich Steiner. It compares Steiner's choice of images for Schimpff und Ernst (1534), a popular anthology of entertaining and serious anecdotes compiled by the Franciscan preacher Johannes Pauli, with woodcuts that Steiner had previously employed in newly translated, moral–philosophical texts by Cicero and Petrarch. Although all three texts problematize the art of painting according to classical and medieval narratives, which urge caution in viewing lifelike images, each proposes diverse solutions for regarding illusionistic works of art. Whereas prior studies focus on the intentions of individual authors, this article highlights the printer–publisher's agency. One image recycled in disparate works speaks to art's multifaceted functions for upper-class, lay readers. This article argues that Steiner's selection of images inserts Pauli's chapter on artists and illusionistic painting into ongoing debates in Reformation-era Germany about the proper role of images in religious ritual. This cross-reading of image–text pairings in the early 1530s offers insights into the complexity of period attitudes towards visual art, the painter's profession, and the beholder's responsibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intended for practical use in the Anglican liturgy but even more deeply invested in their physical status as a book, Smart's 1765 Psalms of David invert the private, ecstatically spiritualized stylizations of Jubilate Agno. Smart's strange and compulsive rendering of Psalm CXIX explores the limits of the earlier poem's engagements with the echoic potential of the phoneme, confining the sound that it exalts to the material and specifically typographical space thereby shown to generate it. I argue that this technique echoes the sonic architecture of Horace Walpole's exactly contemporary Castle of Otranto , linking Smart's Psalm CXIX to the acousmatic pretenses that became a signature of gothic literary form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the itinerant print trade that actively involved the Alpine Tesini pedlars for more than three centuries (between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries) and that profoundly influenced the cultural, social, and economic history of their home valley. The case study of the pedlars from the Tesino valley, in what is now the Trentino region of Northern Italy, offers a privileged perspective for analysing three interrelated broader questions: the dynamics and effects of mobility in Ancien Régime Alpine societies; the spread of cheap print in pre-modern Europe; and the economic system underlying this large-scale trade. Through the analysis of a corpus of previously overlooked notarial sources, this article aims to unravel the complex financial and credit mechanisms that enabled the Tesini pedlars to succeed, but which in many cases were also the cause of their downfall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Reflecting on two research notes in this edition of Quaker Studies, this conversation piece considers the commonalities between them and what they tell us about the direction of future research. The content of each note concerns Quakerism in a local context – examining specific civic, parochial, and educational debates in the East of England – suggesting a need to write Quaker history in a plural fashion. Both authors equally reflect, however, on the migration of disputes across regional and even national boundaries, as well as the insights close readings of texts can give us into their dispersion and the theological and practical relations between denominational groups. Looking forward, both authors affirm the need for a continued attendance to these topics, in addition to the representation of female agency as an authorial and inscribed presence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A brief editorial summarising the content of this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits the authorship of and relationship between three mock‐prognostications published pseudonymously in 1591, drawing on contextual, bibliographical, and stylistical analysis to attribute Two Dangerous Comets and A Wonderful Prognostication to Thomas Nashe. The article also considers the significance of these findings for studies of Nashe, satire, and Elizabethan print culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study argues that Victorian female characters like George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss (1860), denied the classical education their more practical male counterparts enjoy, attempt to create stories around their readings, anticipate plot developments, and finally come to realize the deficiencies of male worldly wisdom. As a result, they turn to out-of-this-world masculine wisdom, the Word of God, practice submission and self-renunciation, and ultimately escape their own plots in a heroic gesture, announcing, as it were, that heroines of the stamp of a Saint Theresa can no longer emerge from a Victorian society that systematically fails to educate its women. Maggie Tulliver is neither the first nor the last female character who struggles to combine a literary discourse of the past with newer forms of narrative discourse, yet she is perhaps the most vibrant example of the nineteenthcentury passive-aggressive reader. George Eliot's precocious female sage is at a crossroads historically, culturally, as well as ideologically, emblematically enacting the shift in reading practices that characterized the nineteenth century, when the Victorian reader became part of a larger cultural movement transitioning from homogenous, selective reading to a heterogenous, scanning type of reading. Eliot's novels seem to be pivoting on this shift, allowing their readers to practice nonsequential reading of characters who themselves are readers of parts. This fragmentariness, as Eliot seems to say, defines the very psychology of nineteenthcentury print culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Histories of Japanese science have been integral in affirming the Meiji Restoration of 1868 as the starting point of modern Japan. Vernacular genres, characterized as "premodern," have therefore largely been overlooked by historians of science, regardless of when they were published. Paradoxically, this has resulted in the marginalization of the very works through which most people encountered science. This article addresses this oversight and its historiographical ramifications by focusing on kyūri books – popular works of science – published in the years following the Restoration, when there was unprecedented public interest in science. It asks, what if we take these kyūri books on their own terms as science books, just as those of the time saw them? This article explores three genres of kyūri books, namely fictionalized formats, such as the epic tale (monogatari); epistolary guides; and genres, such as the sutra, that drew on religious textual practices. It argues that these literary genres provided interpretive frameworks that shaped readers' encounters with "modern" science. This exploration underscores the importance of engaging with vernacular genres to understand the emergence of science as a global category in the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the earliest documented circulation of Shakespeare's Othello in Portugal in 1765. It discusses the broader trend of Anglophone communities in the 18th century reading English literature, as they sought to reconcile their Catholicism with Britain's Protestant society. The article also examines the presence of Shakespeare's works in Portugal before the 19th century, including translations and adaptations. It highlights the role of the English College in Lisbon in promoting Anglophone print culture and fostering an Anglo-Portuguese social community. The article delves into the shipment of books to the English College, including a diverse range of works intended for both English and Portuguese readers, such as Othello and The Funeral: or, Grief A-la-Mode. It also explores the relationship between the English College and the British state, as well as the reception of Shakespeare in Portugal. Overall, this article provides valuable insights into the reading habits and cultural exchange between England and Portugal during this period. [Extracted from the article]

"Libros e imprenta en México en el siglo XVI" is a concise and informative book written by Marina Garone Gravier. It provides foundational knowledge on the introduction and circulation of printed books in Mexico during the 16th century. The book explores the historical, cultural, and social circumstances surrounding the printing of the first editions in Mexico, as well as the key figures and processes involved. It also examines the content, structure, and linguistic features of early Mexican books, highlighting the participation of Indigenous peoples in their production. The book concludes with a reflection on the collectability and preservation of these early printed books. Overall, the book offers a factual and accessible overview of the topic for non-specialized audiences. [Extracted from the article]

"Star Territory: Printing the Universe in Nineteenth-Century America" by Gordon Fraser explores the role of astronomy in early American attempts to seize territory and consolidate global power. Fraser examines how print technology, specifically newspapers and almanacs, mediated Americans' divergent approaches to astronomical study. The book highlights the ways in which marginalized groups, such as Black Americans and Cherokee Nation, used astronomy to imagine different worlds and resist settler-colonial erasure. Fraser also discusses the creation and impact of the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac, which played a crucial role in enhancing America's global influence. The book concludes by reflecting on the continued influence of settler-colonial language in modern space efforts and suggests that early American engagements with space offer alternative perspectives for the future. [Extracted from the article]

This article reviews scholarship in American religious history around the concept of the public sphere. Considering that the public sphere was readily aligned with the productions of the printing press, 'materializing' surveys works that have relied upon, expanded, and critiqued print's centraility to early American religious public culture. Recent attention to materiality has also encouraged greater attention to contingencies, locality of circulation, and specificity of audiences in our studies of public texts that would trouble technological determinisms that readily aligned Protestant ascendance, secular modernity, and print publishing with democratization. The essay concludes with new questions regarding print culture, calls for greater multimedia approaches to our study of media objects, and posits the importance of critically evaluating what we count as public or private in our historical narratives about religious communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chatterton's Commune, the Atheistic Communistic Scorcher (1884–1895) was a journal that troubled the boundaries of nineteenth-century print culture. Ostensibly a periodical, with all the associated markers of form and content (from masthead to 'To Correspondents' column), it might alternatively be considered an expanded broadside, a pamphlet series, or even a proto-zine. This article's close consideration of this publication elaborates upon what the periodical form enabled for Daniel Chatterton—its impoverished editor, sole author, typesetter, printer, and distributor—as a tool of political agitation during the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the publication's materialities of print and production, its resistance to ephemerality (of both print and working-class lives), and Chatterton's aspirations towards radical communality, it argues that by pushing at the limits of freedom of thought Chatterton's Commune brings into focus the perceived power of periodicals at the end of the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present essay examines a sample of satirical prints and broadsides illustrating the main stages of the Queen Caroline affair (QCA). It claims that caricaturists and satirists used the vocabularies of melodrama and farce to transform a divorce scandal into an innovative political and cultural intervention in the public sphere. These popular literary and sub-literary traditions interwove the personal and the political elements of the case and created an innovative political language within a new print culture. This new print culture combined elements of 'high' and 'low' literature and culture thereby challenging cultural hegemony. Against the backdrop of the political protest that followed the end of the Wars in 1815, the satirical representation of the QCA questioned cultural stratification and gloried exploiting 'unrespectability' towards those in power. It was the triumph of laughter. Albeit for a brief period, this type of popular print culture undermined the political and cultural hegemony of the ruling class and became the most innovative attempt to build a more inclusive public sphere in the early nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The eighteenth century saw an increasing interest in oral narrative ballad poetry, whose perceived decline prompted major efforts among antiquarians and collectors to find and preserve all that remained of the old popular songs. Women, long associated with oral tradition, were seen as the preservers of ballad poetry, transmitting their songs orally across generations. Yet while male collectors acknowledged female singers' contributions, they obscured the broader realities of women's engagement with print ballad culture. This article revisits the ballad traditions of Scottish women, exploring how the male-dominated scholarly discourse of the era shaped perceptions of women's involvement in ballad culture. While collectors emphasised the role of female singers as preservers of purely oral tradition, they downplayed women's broader engagement with ballads as printed literature, including their participation in the commercial broadside industry as sellers and consumers. This study reveals a more nuanced picture of women's involvement in balladry, challenging traditional narratives that align women singers exclusively with oral ballad tradition. By acknowledging the diverse ways in which women participated in ballad culture, this research sheds light on the complexities of gender dynamics within the ballad tradition, highlighting the need for a re-evaluation of women's reception and transmission of ballads historically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A flourishing market in literary-scented candles offers olfactory bookish experiences has received little attention from scholars. Whilst the literature on bookishness has not considered candles, they provide a useful perspective from which to consider our relationship to books. Bookish candles transcend the purely olfactory, as their use is often in photographs alongside books, as part of bookish social media culture. I consider how bookish candles, scented and otherwise, through four dynamics: attentiveness to the materiality of books, direct evocation of literary aspects with textual support, expansion beyond the text, and more creative and abstract responses. I draw on notions of affective bibliography, as well as ideas of diegetic and non-diegetic sound from film studies, and argue for a wider bibliography drawing on transmedia approaches to understand this aspect of print culture. I explore the YA phenomenon of Heartstopper through a consideration of candles inspired by Heartstopper sold on Etsy, and made and shared by users on TikTok as examples of bibliographic practices and bibliographical, which not only tell us about what books mean to their owners, but also add an olfactory dimension to our understanding of bookish objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Magic: The Gathering trading card is an underexplored bookish medium for literary theory and print culture that promotes the interrogation of existing conventions of authorship, paratext, and ephemerality. By focusing on the Magic card through a literary lens rather than one of game studies, the cards reveal as much about themselves as they reveal about literary theory. As a user centric medium, Magic cards connect to the larger history of commonplace books and support Barthes' claim of author death. Conversely, the diverse discursive contexts in which Magic cards are used demonstrate the usefulness of Foucault's "author function". Additionally, the compact size of the Magic card creates tension that strains paratextual understandings of unity. By looking at the Magic card as a bookish form, current theoretical understandings are further developed, and real word applications, creating anti-racist spaces and promoting nonlinear and communal storytelling, become demystified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In carefully selected case studies of white and Black middle-class American women, Pawley, a professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Information School, provides a detailed exploration of the "largely untold history" of women who used their involvement in print-centered organizations to reshape their lives beyond the unpaid domestic sphere (1). The first three chapters of the book trace the histories of primarily domestic women who held active roles in institutions of print culture such as journalism and radio broadcasting while the last three focus on the lives of women whose full-time employment helped to shape the developing public library system. While Pawley's main argument is that involvement in print-centered organizations provided these women with opportunities to gain agency, she simultaneously delineates the racial and gender inequality embedded in and replicated by these structures. Through a meticulous examination of institutional records and official documents, Pawley's book is a valuable addition to the historiography of print culture and library and information studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This lead article in a JCMS symposium marking 20 years of normative power provides a prospective intervention into thinking through the rest of the century by taking the language of Arrival, the 2016 speculative fiction film based on Ted Chiang's 1998 short 'Story of Your Life' and applying it to normative power by double‐decolonising the anthropocentrism of capitalist culture and Eurocentrism in order to arrive at planetary politics. The article will first reflect on the 20‐year development of the normative power approach to arrive at a language of comprehension. The subsequent sections will then set out a mode of simultaneous awareness, a medium of sharing relationships and a means for action in concert found in the normative power approach before concluding on how planetary symbiosis is the story of our lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the previously overlooked transatlantic dimensions to the operations and cultures of reading of the American Book-of-the-month club (BOMC) and the British Book Society between 1929–49. These two book sales clubs were major distributors of new books to wide audiences through the mid-twentieth century, disrupting previous patterns of consumption, with a significant impact on book sales and global distribution. Drawing on extensive new archival research, this essay shows how the clubs were part of a broader transatlantic print culture of distribution and reading. Using little-known archival evidence of exchanges among authors, judges, publishers, and texts—as well as new quantitative data parsing book choices and recommendations—it demonstrates how the BOMC and the Book Society were part of a transatlantic publishing ecosystem that shaped interwar and mid-twentieth century reading patterns across the Atlantic and wider Anglophone world. As such, it is the first research to offer a comparative, transatlantic examination of two major Anglophone book distributors that revolutionised how we read and think about books. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges the prevailing belief that Indian print culture emerged in the nineteenth century by exploring the participation of Indians in print culture in the late eighteenth century. It reveals that Indians were actively involved in print culture as both readers and patrons, contributing to periodicals, reading newspapers, and handling official documents. Subscription publishing, a method that limited risk and raised funds in advance, gained popularity in India, with Indian names appearing on almost half of the extant lists of subscribers to books published in India during the eighteenth century. The article argues that this early Indian experience with print laid the foundation for its later proliferation, contradicting the notion that Indian print culture only emerged after the arrival of foreign institutions. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines the role played by magazines in the sustaining, recruiting, defining, and defending of a nationalist community within the British far right. In particular, it focuses on John Tyndall's Spearhead magazine during its period of support for the National Front, perhaps the most prominent and broad-based nationalist movement of the post-war period in Britain. By examining how Spearhead spoke about several key issues – women, homosexuality and faith – the article shows the way magazines bind together a disparate movement that is often small and spread over a geographical distance into a community. Further, the article contends that due to the ostracization from the mainstream that such extreme communities foster, that such communities move beyond surface connections and into para-familial bonds. In making this argument, the article considers the ways that the community is framed around threat and a conspiratorial world war to encourage prioritisation of the nationalist identity and its community, and how the bonds to the nationalist community are deepened through the development of a cultic milieu through the offer of a hidden or sacred truth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article re-evaluates the debates over a proposed Scottish militia that took place in the British public sphere at the height of the Seven Years War and French invasion and Jacobite rebellion scares, and locates within them the origins of the discourse of Highlandism. Accordingly, the real and imagined ethnic traditions and characteristics of Scottish Highlanders to some extent came to represent the entire Scottish nation, while concurrently rehabilitating and replacing former stereotypes of Highlanders as bellicose 'savages' and Jacobite 'rebels.' Further, the debates were not merely informed by domestic politics and intellectual agendas, as typically assumed in the historiography; they were also tied to the larger geopolitical and cultural entanglements of imperial warfare and continued threats from Franco-Jacobite fifth columns, as circulated in an anxious, mercantilist, wartime print culture. These discourses reveal that mid-century whiggish Britons continued to worry about French-instigated rebellion despite historiographical assumptions to the contrary, and experienced considerable uncertainty and concern for the intertwined problems of foreign enemies, overseas war and domestic politics. This context, the widespread doubts surrounding Scotland's trustworthiness and relative status within the Union, and the defensive reactions among certain pro-militia 'Scots', show how commentators mobilised Highland soldiers in support of Scotland's deservedness of political, institutional and cultural equality with England. This, however, was not an era of growing confidence, cumulative antigallican military service and a 'long-eighteenth-century' process of political and cultural consolidation, but rather a deeply uncertain time of burgeoning global conflict and entangled Scotto-Franco-British identity dynamics which must be more fully considered on their own problematic terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Owen (1616–83) was one of the foremost English Puritans of the seventeenth century. His story has been largely limited to events in Britain. The letters examined in this article, translated from the French, reveal Owen's reputation and activity among Huguenots at the end of Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate. Responding to critics of English religion like Moïse Amyraut, they highlight the largely neglected internationality of Interregnum religion and politics in which Owen participated through epistolary and print culture. They display the apocalyptic themes behind attempts at international Protestant union where ecclesiological debates over the nature of synods, toleration, political sovereignty and Church-State relations were decisive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]