Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Reprinting and the Embodied Book

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

"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

• 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.