A Manual Job in a Machine Age: The Long Wait for Mechanized Typesetting
(2024)
Journal Article
All Outputs (22)
Melville and Periodical Culture (2022)
Book Chapter
The New Melville Studies, ed. Cody Marrs (2022)
Journal Article
Nineteenth Century Transnationalism and the Literary Magazine (2021)
Book Chapter
Routes into American Realism (2021)
Book Chapter
Realism is usually associated with American literature written after the Civil War. This essay argues that realism was also a significant force during the late-eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The argument proceeds in three parts. First, the... Read More about Routes into American Realism.
William Dean Howells's Periodical Time (2019)
Journal Article
© 2019 by Arizona Board of Regents. This essay uses the example of William Dean Howells to redefine periodical time and suggest new ways in which extraliterary time manifests itself in literary form and content. Howells spent his early life typesetti... Read More about William Dean Howells's Periodical Time.
Realism and the Profession of Authorship (2019)
Book Chapter
This chapter examines tensions between authorship and publishing in the era of American literary realism. The publishing industry changed with the emergence of literary agents, the growing financial significance of magazines and syndication, and the... Read More about Realism and the Profession of Authorship.
The seriality dividend of American magazines (2018)
Journal Article
This essay argues that the preconsumption cycle of material creation and supply exerted powerful effects as periodicals journeyed from paper mill to reader. So powerful were these effects that they generated a “seriality dividend,” or a return on fin... Read More about The seriality dividend of American magazines.
Herman Melville: among the magazines (2018)
Book
From Mind to Hand: Paper, Pens and the Materiality of Letter Writing (2016)
Book Chapter
“Bartleby” and the magazine fiction (2013)
Book Chapter
The “Plain facts” of fine paper in “The paradise of bachelors and the tartarus of maids” (2012)
Journal Article
This essay intervenes in conversations about mid-nineteenth-century authorship and print culture by distinguishing between the economy of paper and the economy of print. He argues that critical treatments of Melville’s work, and particularly “The Par... Read More about The “Plain facts” of fine paper in “The paradise of bachelors and the tartarus of maids”.
“Frank Lloyd Oop”: microserfs, modern migration, and the architecture of the nineties (2011)
Journal Article
If the early development of the computing industry in America was marked by a preoccupation with hardware, as companies like UNIVAC, DEC, and IBM filled the nation’s corporate and government offices with mainframes, then a similar preoccupation has... Read More about “Frank Lloyd Oop”: microserfs, modern migration, and the architecture of the nineties.
Periodizing the '80s: the 'differential of history' in Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine (2011)
Journal Article
This essay examines how Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine shifts engagement with the details of the material world consistently onto the axis of temporality and how, in so doing, it fashions a theory of periodization in which historical and social tren... Read More about Periodizing the '80s: the 'differential of history' in Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine.
American culture in the 1980s (2007)
Book