Description
Book SynopsisWriters abounded in seventeenth-century New England. From the moment of colonization and constantly thereafter, hundreds of people set pen to paper in the course of their lives, some to write letters that others recopied, some to compose sermons as part of their life work as ministers, dozens to attempt verse, and many more to narrate a remarkable experience, provide written testimony to a civil court, participate in a controversy, or keep some sort of records—and of these everyday forms of writing there was no limit.
Every colonial writer knew of two different modes of publication, each with its distinctive benefits and limitations. One was to entrust a manuscript to a printer who would set type and impose it on sheets of paper that were bound up into a book. The other was to make handwritten copies or have others make copies, possibly unauthorized. Among the colonists, the terms publishing and book referred to both of these technologies. Ways of Writing is about
Trade Review
"[Hall demonstrates] how many well-worn topics stand to be transformed when literature is imagined as a series of practices and books are engaged as material objects. . . . For students of book history and of early New England, Ways of Writing . . . can and should have profound effects on scholarly ways of thinking." * Church History *
"Hall's work . . . complicates and refines our notions of the significance of the individual author and his/her originality in making texts during this period as well as the significance we assign the practices of anonymity. . . . [A] richly detailed and engagingly written study." * American Historical Review *
"Hall's historical research changes our understanding of what a text is as well as the historical reality we can infer from any example of colonial writing. . . . [He] has given scholars of early American literature a great deal of new work to do." * American Literature *
Table of Contents
Ch. 1. Contingencies of Authorship: The Protestant Vernacular Tradition, the Book Trades, and Technologies of Production
Ch. 2. Not in Print yet Published: The Practice of Scribal Publication
Ch. 3. Social Authorship and the Making of Printed Texts
Ch. 4. Textures of Social Authorship: Case Studies
Ch. 5. Between Unity and Sedition: The Practice of Dissent
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Index
