Political Propriety and Feminine Property: Women in the Eighteenth-Century Text Trades

Maruca shows that the author as an accountable agent emerged in England as an entity intrinsically connected to printers, publishers and other legally responsible agents within the trade. She particularly focuses on women in the print trades because their jobs led to the properly feminized eighteenth-century novel. It was the regulations governing the print trade that produced a form of morally authoritative discourse best represented by the woman author

Plagiarism and its (Disciplinary) Discontents: Towards an Interdisciplinary Theory and Pedagogy

Despite the abundance of literature on the topic, there is very little that can be called “common” about our common sense understanding of plagiarism. Taking a closer look at the history, rhetorical uses, and cultural practices of plagiarism, this essay reveals that this concept is multiple and heterogeneous, riddled with contradictions and blind spots. As a result, the article argues the overlapping, inter-related, yet distinct discourses of plagiarism that circulate within the academy can be usefully described as a “complex system.” In positing plagiarism as a complex system, this article has several goals. First, it shows how singular approaches to plagiarism are ultimately insufficient and examines the ways in which an interdisciplinary consideration of the issues can shed light on the problem. Next, it uses the issue of plagiarism to examine the rubric of “complexity” itself, suggesting ways that recent uses of the term within interdisciplinary research might be modified and extended. Finally, it uses this enhanced, integrative understanding of plagiarism to make pragmatic proposals for both pedagogy and policy

Bodies of Type: The Work of Textual Production in English Printers\u27 Manuals

This essay examines the shifting, ideologically situated and contested representations of print texts and technologies in two representative printers\u27 manuals: Joseph Moxon\u27s 1683 Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing and John Smith\u27s 1755 The Printer\u27s Grammar. The construction of orderly print is supported in each by changing discourses of sexuality and gender. Moxon\u27s manual celebrates the heterosexual working bodies of print, the laborers whose physical production of print is as important as the text supplied by writers. In Smith, however, the naturalized gendering of a now invisible print privileges only the Author, whose disembodied intellect transcends the physical book

What Is Critical Bibliography?

This introduction to the special issue, “New Approaches to Critical Bibliography and the Material Text,” defines critical bibliography as a method that, at the intersection of critical theory and bibliographic study, challenges standard histories of the book and bookish objects. Drawing on feminist studies, critical race studies, postcolonialism, Marxism, queer theory, and disability studies, among others, critical bibliography, the authors argue, calls attention to the structures of oppression upholding the circulation, preservation, and organization of material texts—but also the possibilities of liberation therein. Taking up this method from a variety of fields and periods, the essays in this issue take on the very grounds, definitions, and boundaries of traditional bibliography, asking epistemological and ontological questions that interrogate the material and conceptual construction of bibliographic knowledge itself

Review of Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690–1820s: The Long Eighteenth Century

Review of Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britai