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All Outputs (16)

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.

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.

Special Issue Introduction: Early American Fictionality (2021)
Journal Article
Pethers, M., & Koenigs, T. (2021). Special Issue Introduction: Early American Fictionality. Early American Literature, 56(3), 669-698. https://doi.org/10.1353/eal.2021.0063

This introduction to the special issue “Early American Fictionality” provides a detailed overview of the concept of fictionality and a concise history of its scholarly uses and outlines a vision of what greater attention to it in early American liter... Read More about Special Issue Introduction: Early American Fictionality.

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.

The Early American Novel in Fragments: Reading and Writing Serial Fiction in the Post-Revolutionary United States (2014)
Book Chapter
PETHERS, M. (2014). The Early American Novel in Fragments: Reading and Writing Serial Fiction in the Post-Revolutionary United States. In P. Parrinder, A. Nash, & N. Wilson (Eds.), New Directions in the History of the Novel (63-75). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137026989_4

Following the trend towards authoritative ‘collected works’ and definitive ‘libraries of classics’ inaugurated in both Britain and the United States in the 1860s, publishers today tend to package old novels in a seamless, self-contained, visually uni... Read More about The Early American Novel in Fragments: Reading and Writing Serial Fiction in the Post-Revolutionary United States.