A Periodical Masquerade: The History of the Book in Nineteenth Century America, Unbound

Pethers, Matthew

Abstract

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 assumptions that “the book” is a physically coherent and obviously identifiable entity. Looking closely at how the transportation infrastructure of the nineteenth-century print market determined and complicated American understandings of what a book was, it uses the legal and aesthetic debates triggered by evolving distinctions between bound and unbound texts to explore the historically malleable nature of “the book.” Concentrating particularly on the US postal system, which constantly struggled to define and regulate the printed matter passing through it during the nineteenth century as publishers sought to access cheaper circulation rates by presenting book-like material in periodical formats, this study of quasi-books ranges from Washington Irving’s Sketch Book (1819–1820) through the “mammoth weeklies” of the 1840s to the “Library” series of the 1870s.

Citation

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

• Publication Date: 2025
• Deposit Date: Oct 8, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 1, 2025
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 186-202
• Book Title: The New Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies
• Chapter Number: 13
• ISBN: 9781009296731
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/40551550
• Publisher URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/new-nineteenthcentury-american-literary-studies/periodical-masquerade/C37E42376EF6FDEECA68D5D44D2326D4
• Contract Date: May 1, 2024