Outputs (16)

A Periodical Masquerade: The History of the Book in Nineteenth Century America, Unbound (2025)
Book Chapter
Pethers, M. (2025). A Periodical Masquerade: The History of the Book in Nineteenth Century America, Unbound. In The New Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies (186-202). Cambridge University Press

This essay uses concepts drawn from the field of New Materialism, which posits that material objects possess forms of agency that shape human culture rather than just being passively acted upon, to move the history of the book beyond common assumptio... Read More about A Periodical Masquerade: The History of the Book in Nineteenth Century America, Unbound.

Parting with Wholes in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art (2024)
Book Chapter
Pethers, M., & Couch, D. D. (2024). Parting with Wholes in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art. In The Part and the Whole in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art. Bucknell University Press

Encyclopaedias, Information Overload, and the Intellectual Division of Labor in Early America (2024)
Journal Article
Pethers, M. (2024). Encyclopaedias, Information Overload, and the Intellectual Division of Labor in Early America. Early American Studies, 22(4), 562-612. https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2024.a942215

This article examines the history of encyclopedias in North America and Britain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to foreground wider shifts in knowledge formation and organization caused by a growing perception of information overload.... Read More about Encyclopaedias, Information Overload, and the Intellectual Division of Labor in Early America.

William Williams, Anachronism, and the Temporal Logic of Textual Recovery (1776/1815/1969) (2024)
Journal Article
Pethers, M. (2024). William Williams, Anachronism, and the Temporal Logic of Textual Recovery (1776/1815/1969). American Literary History, 36(1), 16-50. https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajad230

This article takes the distinctive publishing history of William Williams's Robinsonade novel Mr. Penrose as a prompt to challenge conventional assumptions about the temporal logic of textual recovery. Scholars typically make a case for the value of... Read More about William Williams, Anachronism, and the Temporal Logic of Textual Recovery (1776/1815/1969).

The Face of Poverty : Physiognomics, Social Mobility, and the Politics of Recognition in the Early Nineteenth-Century American Novel (2023)
Journal Article
Pethers, M. (2023). The Face of Poverty : Physiognomics, Social Mobility, and the Politics of Recognition in the Early Nineteenth-Century American Novel. J19: The Journal of Nineteenth Century Americanists, 11(1), 91-119. https://doi.org/10.1353/jnc.2023.a909297

From Jacob Riis to Michael Harrington, observers of American poverty have often focused, in literal and metaphorical ways, on the faces of the economically dispossessed, finding in them a means to generate emotional responses that are more personaliz... Read More about The Face of Poverty : Physiognomics, Social Mobility, and the Politics of Recognition in the Early Nineteenth-Century American Novel.

A Periodical Masquerade: The History Of The Book in Nineteenth-Century America, Unbound (2023)
Book Chapter
Pethers, M. A Periodical Masquerade: The History Of The Book in Nineteenth-Century America, Unbound. In The New Nineteenth Century American Literary Studies. Cambridge University Press

Periodical Queries: Early American Magazine Writing in and out of the Charles Brockden Brown Canon (2022)
Journal Article
Pethers, M., & von Morzé, L. (2022). Periodical Queries: Early American Magazine Writing in and out of the Charles Brockden Brown Canon. Early American Literature, 57(2), 555-562. https://doi.org/10.1353/eal.2022.0042

This contribution to a symposium on The Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown discusses Brown's late eighteenth-century magazine writing and the questions they raise around authorial attribution, literary anonymity and pseudonymity, and period... Read More about Periodical Queries: Early American Magazine Writing in and out of the Charles Brockden Brown Canon.

Serialization and the Narrative Scales of the Literary Magazine (2021)
Book Chapter
Pethers, M. (2022). Serialization and the Narrative Scales of the Literary Magazine. In Routledge Companion to the British and North American Literary Magazine. Taylor & Francis (Routledge)

“The serial … is essential to every periodical,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazineobserved in its May 1866 issue. “Every magazine has its serial, and it is generally very good” (HNMM 1866, 32: 803). The truth in this statement is one increasingly recogni... Read More about Serialization and the Narrative Scales of the Literary Magazine.

The Periodical Text Network, Serialized Genres, and the Making of “Literature” in the Nineteenth-Century United States (2021)
Journal Article
Pethers, M. (2021). The Periodical Text Network, Serialized Genres, and the Making of “Literature” in the Nineteenth-Century United States. Nineteenth Century Studies, 33(1), 19-45. https://doi.org/10.5325/ninecentstud.33.0019

This article intervenes into current debates around genre and textual production in nineteenth-century American periodical culture by expanding our understanding of magazine serialization beyond its typical focus on fiction. Drawing on various theori... Read More about The Periodical Text Network, Serialized Genres, and the Making of “Literature” in the Nineteenth-Century United States.

Portrait Miniatures: Fictionality, Visual Culture, and the Scene of Recognition in Early National America (2021)
Journal Article
Pethers, M., & Koenigs, T. (2021). Portrait Miniatures: Fictionality, Visual Culture, and the Scene of Recognition in Early National America. Early American Literature, 56(3), 755-807. https://doi.org/10.1353/eal.2021.0066

This essay seeks to expand the geographical and formal scope of the concept of fictionality by examining the self-conscious presentation of fictional beings’ nonreferentiality in early American visual culture. Its principal case study is a portrait o... Read More about Portrait Miniatures: Fictionality, Visual Culture, and the Scene of Recognition in Early National America.