Ellen Garvey

From: National Humanites Center

Information on Speaker

My first book The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture won the SHARP prize in 1996. I am currently on fellowship at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina finishing my book, Book, Paper, Scissors: Scrapbooks Remake Print Culture. I am past president of the Research Society for American Periodicals and run its Resources website. I am Associate Professor of English at New Jersey City University.

Abstract

Nineteenth century American periodicals continually recirculated articles, stories, and poems from one paper or magazine to another, with and without credit, via the practice known as "exchanging." Individual readers also recirculated magazine and newspaper items into their scrapbooks, which served as homemade repositories of material that they wished to refer to again, or that they wished to pass along to others in their community. A Civil War poem from Harper's Monthly, for example, might travel to the Boston Evening Transcript, and from there migrate into the scrapbooks of readers who collected it, each for is or her own purposes.

Periodicals were also reprocessed into scrapbooks for the schoolroom; such scrapbooks were sometimes referred to as newspapers themselves, pointing to the sense that scrapbook makers had that items in the press, though authored by others, might express their own personal and community concerns. Scrapbooks made from periodicals entered into 19th century pedagogy. I will focus specifically on poetry, drawing on recent work by Joan Shelley Rubin, Virginia Jackson, Max Cavitch, and Kirsten Silva Gruesz. Students made scrapbooks as class projects, and teachers were encouraged to create collections of poetry and other literary works for classroom use from their periodical reading. The scrapbook itself was understood as a species of pedagogy, training its makers in taste, and indirectly in choosing among and within periodicals. It trained the reader to see the visual form of the periodical as natural as well: readers absorbed and recreated the column layout even when they were free of the technical constraints that created it. Mimicking these familiar visual qualities of the periodical transferred the authority of the printed page to the cut and pasted page, and may have allowed scrapbook compilers to place themselves in a more authoritative, publisher-like role.

Reprinting and recirculation of poetry into school primers imposed additional layers of temporality and participation in a reading public on the circulation of poetry. Periodical publication placed poetry within the community of readers, as theorized by Benedict Anderson, or the reading public theorized by Michael Warner, in which readers are aware that other people one does not know are reading the work at the same time. I will discuss the somewhat differently inflected version of this that textbook publication offered a somewhat differently inflected version of this.

Part of this Conference or Workshop: SHARP 2008