Paperscapes: navigating books in Early Modern England
<p>This thesis attends to the place of paper in early modern literature, both in actuality and in imaginary form. While a conventional set of (often gendered) tropes holds paper to be passive, blank, and static, these four chapters attend to texts and sites which resist those tropes, and which...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
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2020
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| _version_ | 1797101324527992832 |
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| author | Wilson, G |
| author2 | Smyth, A |
| author_facet | Smyth, A Wilson, G |
| author_sort | Wilson, G |
| collection | OXFORD |
| description | <p>This thesis attends to the place of paper in early modern literature, both in actuality and in imaginary form. While a conventional set of (often gendered) tropes holds paper to be passive, blank, and static, these four chapters attend to texts and sites which resist those tropes, and which foreground paper’s role as an intellectual-material site that is both agentic and mobile. <em>Paperscapes: Navigating Books in Early Modern England</em> fuses literary scholarship, bibliography, and book history to engage with the affordances of paper as textual substrate and material form.</p>
<p>The structure of this thesis foregrounds paper on the move. The chapters focus on the paper volvelles that direct readers around George Wither’s <em>Collection of Emblemes</em> (1635), whose verse enables spiritual as well as bibliographic modes of navigation; on the stories that imprints tell about paper’s journeys through the city, which collide with the textual routes of James Howell’s <em>Londinopolis</em> (1657); on the moving sheets and books which trouble the rhetoric of Samuel Pepys’ aspirationally static library; and on the global narratives of circulation in which John Taylor’s <em>The Praise of Hempseed</em> (1620) implicates paper. <em>Paperscapes</em> takes its structure from actual sites through which paper moves – the book, the city, the library, and the globe – while simultaneously asserting that paper as substrate makes room for the texts in which imaginary journeys of readers and books play out. Reading early modern printed texts was and is to encounter paper in a contingent place and form. Noting both that paper moves around, and that place matters for how we read, this thesis argues that the mobility of paper has literary implications in unsettling the meaning of text. Paperscapes reverses the suggestion that ‘text is more legible than its substrate’, and provides a paper counterpoint to the codex which is grounded both in material readings and in the early modern imagination. </p>
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| first_indexed | 2024-03-07T05:50:15Z |
| format | Thesis |
| id | oxford-uuid:e89efda6-c231-4557-80bb-ed0e798a940e |
| institution | University of Oxford |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-03-07T05:50:15Z |
| publishDate | 2020 |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | oxford-uuid:e89efda6-c231-4557-80bb-ed0e798a940e2022-03-27T10:48:12ZPaperscapes: navigating books in Early Modern EnglandThesishttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_db06uuid:e89efda6-c231-4557-80bb-ed0e798a940eLiteratureEarly modern, 1500-1700Cataloging of archival materialsStationers' Hall (London, England)BibliographyPaperReadingEnglishHyrax Deposit2020Wilson, GSmyth, ASmith, OJason, SWSmith, E<p>This thesis attends to the place of paper in early modern literature, both in actuality and in imaginary form. While a conventional set of (often gendered) tropes holds paper to be passive, blank, and static, these four chapters attend to texts and sites which resist those tropes, and which foreground paper’s role as an intellectual-material site that is both agentic and mobile. <em>Paperscapes: Navigating Books in Early Modern England</em> fuses literary scholarship, bibliography, and book history to engage with the affordances of paper as textual substrate and material form.</p> <p>The structure of this thesis foregrounds paper on the move. The chapters focus on the paper volvelles that direct readers around George Wither’s <em>Collection of Emblemes</em> (1635), whose verse enables spiritual as well as bibliographic modes of navigation; on the stories that imprints tell about paper’s journeys through the city, which collide with the textual routes of James Howell’s <em>Londinopolis</em> (1657); on the moving sheets and books which trouble the rhetoric of Samuel Pepys’ aspirationally static library; and on the global narratives of circulation in which John Taylor’s <em>The Praise of Hempseed</em> (1620) implicates paper. <em>Paperscapes</em> takes its structure from actual sites through which paper moves – the book, the city, the library, and the globe – while simultaneously asserting that paper as substrate makes room for the texts in which imaginary journeys of readers and books play out. Reading early modern printed texts was and is to encounter paper in a contingent place and form. Noting both that paper moves around, and that place matters for how we read, this thesis argues that the mobility of paper has literary implications in unsettling the meaning of text. Paperscapes reverses the suggestion that ‘text is more legible than its substrate’, and provides a paper counterpoint to the codex which is grounded both in material readings and in the early modern imagination. </p> |
| spellingShingle | Literature Early modern, 1500-1700 Cataloging of archival materials Stationers' Hall (London, England) Bibliography Paper Reading Wilson, G Paperscapes: navigating books in Early Modern England |
| title | Paperscapes: navigating books in Early Modern England |
| title_full | Paperscapes: navigating books in Early Modern England |
| title_fullStr | Paperscapes: navigating books in Early Modern England |
| title_full_unstemmed | Paperscapes: navigating books in Early Modern England |
| title_short | Paperscapes: navigating books in Early Modern England |
| title_sort | paperscapes navigating books in early modern england |
| topic | Literature Early modern, 1500-1700 Cataloging of archival materials Stationers' Hall (London, England) Bibliography Paper Reading |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT wilsong paperscapesnavigatingbooksinearlymodernengland |