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The article investigates the production of anonymous texts in early modern England, focusing on the period when the printing industry has been emerging. It explores the characteristics and functions of anonymity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly in relation to street literature. It further includes analyzing broadsheets, pamphlets, and other ephemeral printed materials.

From a brief description of the trajectory of studies on cordel literature (street/popular literature) and on the formation of the collection of chapbooks at Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa (FCRB), this article reports the development of the research in its first year, having delimited the sample with a focus on production of the poet Leandro Gomes de Barros from considerations raised during the reading of works on literature and copyright legislation. The analysis was made in the investigation of authors' biographical data, in an attempt to discover the original authorship of the selected titles. The searches were made in authority databases, in the authority catalogs of the American Library of Congress, the Brazilian National Library and the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF). The results presented some determining points in the characterization of a future policy of public access to the cordel literature collection of the FCRB, especially the difference in the legal nature between the chapbooks in public domain and the ones reissued by contemporary publishers, which are protected by copyright. In this sense, it was found out that the collection of works by Leandro Gomes Barros were published with indication of other authors and not only attributed to João Martins de Athayde. Therefore, the article highlights the complexity of cordel literature in relation to copyright and points out to the need for greater depth in the investigation, with a view to developing correct criteria to identification and register of authorship in the most correct possible way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article examines the development of the Gothic mode across the centuries in terms of transmedial contagion. In particular, the analysis focuses on the survival of specific Gothic tropes and figures in the nineteenth-century street literature phenomenon of penny-blood. This lowbrow literary form will be considered in its inherent dynamics of adaptation and appropriation to highlight its role in transforming some of the most iconic characters into vehicles of cultural transmission: memes that have come to redefine the viewer’s relationship to Victorian literature and culture.

Philip Kerr's last novel Metropolis (2019) returns his detective, Bernie Gunther, to 1928 as both prequel and epilogue to his series of 14 novels. This essay locates the key to Gunther's identity and actions in his relation to arch--Nazi Arthur Nebe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Henry Mayhew is renowned as the chronicler and historian of London street-sellers and poor labourers. However, Mayhew's relationships with his subjects, and their influence on the development of London Labour and the London Poor , is less often discussed. This article examines Mayhew's productive and disruptive friendships, collaborations, and disagreements with the London poor, and situates these exchanges within the layered print and oral texts that comprise the extensive media ecology of London Labour. I argue that through their disruptive collaborations with Mayhew, some street-sellers, including Charles Alloway, memorialized as 'The Crippled Street-Seller of Nut-Meg Graters', strategically harnessed the media forms of London Labour for profitable self-representation. In contrast, a group of street-sellers known as the Street Traders' Protection Association mobilized against Mayhew and critiqued his representations of their class. These disruptive collaborations reveal underlying kinships and conflicts between Mayhew and the street-folk, thus destabilizing his reputation as a neutral and authoritative observer in the history of poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What can street ballads tell us about the lives and realities of “common people”, of experiences “from below”? This article discusses the functional aesthetics and social context of one particular genre that has circulated in ephemeral song prints (skillingtryck) in Sweden: beggar verses of the blind. For centuries, such songs were sold in the streets and at market places as a means for the blind to earn a living, and a major part of them tell the life story, the sad fate, of their protagonists. Many prints declare the genre of autobiography on their very front page, quite literally selling the story of the protagonist’s life and addressing the audience’s compassion. How, then, do these narratives relate to real life? How is individuality and authenticity expressed within a genre that to a large extent relies upon conventions and formulas? As is argued, songs of this kind are a suggestive source material of vernacular literacy, as well as of social and personal history from below. Simultaneously, the discourse is marked by and shaped in a dialogue with the sighted world’s view of the blind.

The article examines the development of the Gothic mode across the centuries in terms of transmedial contagion. In particular, the analysis focuses on the survival of specific Gothic tropes and figures in the nineteenth-century street literature phenomenon of penny blood. The lowbrow literary form will be considered in its inherent dynamics of adaptation and appropriation to highlight its role in transforming some of the most iconic characters into vehicles of cultural transmission: memes that have come to redefine the viewer's relationship to Victorian literature and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Leipzig physician Caspar Kegler created novel alchemical plague cures in the early sixteenth century that were among the first brand-name medicines developed in German-speaking lands. Although Kegler is largely unknown today, he and his descendants secured his fame by promoting his secret cures and distributing his printed pamphlets throughout German-speaking lands between 1521 and 1607. This article argues that Kegler's work in creating and promoting novel cures represents a new sort of entrepreneurial activity among sixteenth-century physicians. Kegler's case raises questions about the role of vernacular print and commercial motives in transforming early modern medicine to a more empirical discipline and explores how alchemy, persistent epidemics, and the turbulence of the early Reformation encouraged medical and cultural change. Since Kegler predates Paracelsus, his case also illuminates the depth of alchemical activities among German physicians in the early sixteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1619, Marie de Médicis sought to regain her seat on the royal council by leading an armed revolt against her son King Louis XIII of France. She sought noble support through a pamphlet campaign attacking the king's advisers, and the king responded with his own series of pamphlets. The king's pamphlets were more widely read and more influential than his mother's because they responded directly to the problem of resolving the crisis. He portrayed himself as a young warrior king acting decisively as head of state, and his mother as a weak, confused woman who had abandoned her natural role as a mother and was being manipulated by selfish, quarreling great nobles. She did not counter with a convincing explanation of what she was trying to accomplish, and her supporters began to switch sides in large numbers during the autumn of 1620, thus resolving the crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the literary texts of Pennsylvania's 1764 Paxton pamphlet war, giving close attention to the linguistic representations through which vying parties attempted to claim superiority in the Anglo-American sociopolitical hierarchy. Competing ethnic and political groups published creative literature (including poetry, dialogues, a farce, and a narrative) disparaging their opponents' British virtue and status by lampooning their literary and grammatical acuity and emphasizing their deviation from "acceptable" spoken English. Through analysis of the pamphlet war's portrayals of Quaker, American Indian, and Scots-Irish Presbyterian language, this essay demonstrates that the interrelated issues of language, virtue, and British identity were central to the concerns of provincial Pennsylvanians in 1764. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Admiral John Benbow's eventful naval career ended in 1702, following a courageous and much celebrated sea-fight against a French squadron in Caribbean waters, which led to his death. Due to a well-publicized trial of the admiral's seditious captains, Richard Kirkby and Cooper Wade, the episode became firmly established in the English public imagination and the tale was told and retold in song. Biographers of Benbow often encourage the idea that popular Benbow ballads were first sung immediately after his death in 1702, though well-known examples from today have only been traced in hard copy to the late eighteenth century. However, a rare publication has recently come to light at Longleat House, Wiltshire, which contains two examples of Benbow ballads printed at the time of his death, independent of the later documented ballads. Together, they reflect contemporary interest in the actions of captains Kirkby and Wade, as well as Benbow's bravery. This article, which includes a complete transcription of the ballad texts, aims to anchor the tradition of the Benbow ballad firmly in the earliest period following his death, to an extent that has not been possible before. It raises the question what other examples may have once existed, or are still to be discovered in as yet uncatalogued collections of street literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Luca Baratta's book consists of a catalogue of forty-eight full-length documents - street literature, such as broadside ballads, pamphlets and leaflets, as well as medical writings drawn from Philosophical Transactions - that all deal with the phenomenon of monstrous births in early modern England. The volume is divided in four parts: "God's judgment (1550-1603)", "The Great Amazement (1603-1642)", "The Monsters' Wars (1642-1660)", and "The Age of Wonders, the Age of Science (1660-1715)". In each section, the documents are distributed according to a chronological order, with the aim to show the metamorphoses that the perceptions and representations of monsters have gone through in the course of time: from prodigies with religious implications to objects of curiosity and scientific enquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides one of the first studies of two late works by George Chapman, “Pro Vere” (1622) and “A iustification of a strange action of Nero” (1629). Through a close examination of these works, and through situating Chapman’s texts alongside other neglected works of the 1620s that voiced opposition to the Stuart court and kings, the article examines the critical and subversive role that classical history and gendered language played in forging ideological conflict in England during the Stuart period. More broadly, the article seeks to demonstrate the importance of studying imaginative writings for understanding Stuart political culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the playbill dating from the early 1630s preserved at the British Library, which shows the characteristics of a once common form of cheap print. It highlights the attractions of the announced show, featuring rope walking and dancing by infant phenomena, detailed in the playbill's ornamental border and decorated initial capital.

The article is dedicated to the topos of the street in literary texts about Odessa. It discusses the Odessan street drawing on well-known authors such as Aleksandr Pushkin and Vladimir Zhabotinskii, as well as lesser-known writers like Semen Iushkevich, Eduard Bagritskii and Iurii Olesha. Contextualizing their texts with approaches in urban studies that were developed with reference to Western cities, the article shows Odessa's unique imagery of public space, arguing that the street provides not only insight into changing perceptions of the self and the individual's status in public space, but fulfils a significant function in Russia's symbolic order -- indeed, it is the key literary topos used to explore the country's ethnic diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the term "folheto," which could mean either booklet or pamphlet, largely employed by early twentieth-century Brazilian folklorists, poets and their audience. Folhetos are brochures that usually contain eight, sixteen or thirty-two pages and are always written in verse.

This qualitative inquiry, situated within the social networking site, Facebook and an urban public library, examined the way six Black adolescent girls represented self and made sense of and disrupted representations of Black girlhood through book club discussions of the street literature text, PUSH by Sapphire. Online discussions, field observations, focus group interviews, and a researcher journal were employed. Hip-hop feminist theory, new literacy studies, and reader response theory undergirded this study. Findings revealed that participants' self-representations were shaped by (a) the use of multiple modalities (b) the collective Black girl experience (c) society's neglect of Black girls (d) perspectives around personal traumatic experiences; and (e) social norms around literacy and language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the Renaissance, there was a long tradition of popular street performance concerning poverty. Sometimes the singer lamented his own hardship; sometimes he voiced the plight of the poor in general. In the sixteenth century, in the face of dearth and economic decline, a number of such works were printed in cheap pamphlets, sometimes commissioned by the performer himself to sell after his show to the public assembled in the piazza or street. This article examines how such themes were expressed in oral and printed forms by looking at a number of popular works from this period that commented on or complained about the growing inequality of Italian society, the careless prodigality of the rich and the suffering of the poor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent critical emphasis on the court patronage enjoyed by the commedia dell’arte may create the impression that professional actors did not perform in Italian streets and piazzas, as nineteenth-century Romantic critics asserted they did. Although it does exist, archival evidence for outdoor commedia dell’arte performance is slimmer than one might imagine. Cheap print, however, which flourished in the sixteenth century and frequently invokes the actual actors as well as the fictional personages of the commedia dell’arte, provides concrete additional evidence for outdoor performance, and for the ways in which the worlds of cheap print, piazza performance, and organized professional activity interacted. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay discusses diarist and collector Pierre de Estoile of Paris, France, focusing on how his collecting activities of ephemeral print and print culture of the French Wars of Religion exemplified record keeping in the early modern period. He created a scrapbook he entitled "Drolleries of the League" which featured printed works created between the 1585 treaty of Péronne until the 1598 Edict of Nantes, which declared that all records of the wars should be destroyed and erased.

Recent investigations into nineteenth-century juvenile delinquency have tended to focus on how the image of the delinquent was represented through the judicial process and the language of institutional reform. The argument has been that the delinquent was an antithetical creation of middle-class views about childhood, family, criminality, and punishment. What has been overlooked in the discussion is how working-class audiences represented young men who committed crimes. Broadside ballads, a form of working-class street poetry, are unique in that they create representations of youthful criminality from within the community whence young convicts originated. This article looks at four different types of broadside ballads: valedictory, betrayal, confessional, and satirical ballads that offer fresh and unique ways of understanding youthful criminality, convictism, and penal transportation within working-class culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses the representations of infanticide in French street literature between 1574 and 1651 through the study of the canards, chapbooks sold to a wide audience. In the analyzed period, these texts circulated fantastic and bloody stories, which highlighted female cruelty. Acting at the same time as a product and a driving force of the growing moralization of the realm, these pieces show the dangers of debauched women, and the need of controlling them. In search of a literary depiction of the criminal woman's social image and her otherness, this paper deals with the transmission of a moral code to women and the concerns about infanticide, part of a relentless struggle against the corruption of youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The second Ottoman siege of Vienna (1683) generated a higher volume of English writing than any other seventeenth-century event involving the Ottomans. This article focuses upon ballads written in the immediate aftermath of the siege and relates them to the concurrent English political context of the Tory reaction to the exclusion crisis. Situating these ballads within the publication milieu of pamphlet news and political polemic, it examines the figures who produced them and the audiences they were aimed at. Following from this, it shows how the use of commonplace images and associations with the ‘Turk’ as a recurring figure in early modern writing allowed these ballads to find, or depict, synchronicities between the events of the siege of Vienna, and the English political scene. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

African American street literature (also known as urban literature, ghetto fiction, or hip-hop literature) has become a driving force of black literary production in the twenty-first century. Titles such as Teri Woods's True to the Game (1998), Sister Souljah's The Coldest Winter Ever (1999), and Vickie M. Stringer's Let That Be the Reason (2001) have sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and independent black publishing imprints such as Triple Crown Publications release dozens of new books each year to a growing community of eager readers.Although self-published and independently-published black books are a significant part of the literary and cultural scene today, African American urban fiction got its start at a small white-owned publishing company called Holloway House in the 1960s and 1970s. Former pimps and prisoners, including Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, pioneered the genre by publishing gritty and personal accounts of their own experiences in the streets, inspiring generations of black authors, filmmakers, and hip-hop artists.Two of the original members of the Holloway House school of black fiction were Dr. Roland Jefferson and Odie Hawkins. Starting their writing careers in the early 1970s and continuing to publish today, Jefferson and Hawkins have both been active contributors to the Los Angeles literary scene for over forty years. In these interviews, they discuss their unique pathways to authorship, the racial politics of paperback publishing at Holloway House, and the contemporary self-publishing literary marketplace. Providing a much-needed context for the genesis of self-published street literature, Jefferson and Hawkins offer insight into alternative African American literary traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Cataloguing and describing of ephemera is not included in the present standards and rules of bibliographic description. The term refers to the material which, by its purpose, manner of production and distribution, format, size, graphic design and presentation of data, differs from typical library items which are the products of the professional publishing industry, and it needs to be treated in a specific way. Even the publishing process is not the same for the items of printed ephemera as for printed monographs. Since ephemera are too numeruous to describe undividually, collection bibliographic records are created for a group of items which share unifying aspects such as subject or issuing body. The propositions for collection-level description of printed ephemera vary form library to library. The paper describes in detail the practice and rules for the collection-level bibliographic record description of printed ephemera in the National and University Library in Zagreb. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented which discusses various reports within the issue on topics including neoliberalism in 21st-century Brazil, Egyptian street literature, and laws concerning women's speech in 20th-century Ireland.