Cultural Narratives: Textuality and Performance in American Culture before 1900

"This volume brings together some of the most exciting work in print culture and 'old new media' studies (relating to early America) that is being done today. The collection will have an avid scholarly audience as the interdisciplinary fields of book history and of media, literacy, and performance studies, and their subfields, continue to thrive." —Patricia Crain, New York University

“This rich study redefines text, memoir, narrative, performance, and performance spheres in ways that will enhance our understanding of how American culture developed before the turn of the twentieth century. Choosing `moments of eloquence' or intriguing `cultural artifacts,' Cultural Narratives encompasses an extraordinary range of topics, including cross-cultural exchanges of music, poetry, oral narrative, and theatrical traditions. It delves into codes of civility, poetic performance, visual and verbal literacy, considering issues of race, class, and gender, and how they intersected with the ‘texts’ so many Americans used in shaping their own identities.” —Heather S. Nathans, University of Maryland

“This collection contains important contributions to our understanding of a wide range of media in America before 1900. The volumes published in A History of the Book in America have already begun to give an impressive sense of the major contribution of the history of the book to our understanding of American culture, but Cultural Narratives goes beyond the brief of those volumes both in emphasizing other media than the book and in stressing the interrelations between those media. This volume is important not only to scholars working in American Studies but also to anyone interested in the impact of ‘textual media’ in the making of culture and history.” —Peter Stallybrass, University of Pennsylvania

“Gustafson and Sloat show how memories ‘have enough cultural currency to be a historical category.’ Textual information is well cited and documented, and the titles of the chapters are intriguing. Useful to specialists in American studies, English, or history.” —Choice

"The seventeen essays in this collection are relatively brief; most of them serve as provocations for new approaches, distillations of the authors' larger projects, or meditations on method. Those that attend especially to women offer vivid snapshots of the possibilities and perils of literacy and writing in a colonial through antebellum context. . . . What is clear from this collection is that . . .[i]n the context of textuality and performance in early America, many forms of publication, including print, opened up alternative modes for the production of meaning—meaning that we continue to discover." —Legacy

“Resisting the tendency to hyper-specialize that one often sees manifested in contemporary edited collections, the book is appealingly ‘loose’ in its structure . . . an excellent example of the scholarship that can emerge when some of the newest and most original thought is applied to the oldest of American texts.” —Years Work in English Studies

“This collection—with contributions to Native American studies, musicology, race and culture, and the examination of precise sites of literacy—provides a map of the interactions between the emerging media that constituted early and nineteenth-century American culture. It also marks a significant broadening of the modes of enquiry and material considerations of book history.” —SHARP News