Major Publications
How (and Why) to Do Things with Eighteenth-Century Manuscripts, co-authored with Michelle Levy. Cambridge UP (Cambridge Elements series), 2021.
This Element examines eighteenth-century manuscript forms, their functions in the literary landscape of their time, and the challenges and practices of manuscript study today. Drawing on both literary studies and book history, we offer a guide to handwritten manuscripts produced in the first era of print dominance, 1730-1820. After an opening survey of sociable literary culture and its manuscript forms, numerous case studies explore what can be learned from three manuscript types: the verse miscellany, the familiar correspondence, and manuscripts of literary works that were printed. A final section considers issues of digital remediation, and the Element concludes with a brief case study of the movement of Phillis Wheatley's poems between manuscript and print.
The Manuscript Book in the Long Eighteenth Century, special issue of Eighteenth-Century Life, co-edited with Alexis Chema, forthcoming.
This special issue celebrates the vitality, variety, and cultural significance of scribal book production in the transatlantic anglophone world of the eighteenth century. Each of its 11 original essays is based on archival study of one or more of these unique books (or, in a few cases, proto-books), illustrating and theorizing the expressive, sociable, meaning-making, aesthetic, and memorializing impulses that are manifested in their pages.
Women in Book History, 1660-1830, special issue of the Huntington Library Quarterly, co-edited with Michelle Levy, vol. 84, no. 1, Spring 2021.
This volume presents new knowledge about women’s contributions to manuscript and print production and circulation throughout the long eighteenth century. An introduction by Margaret J.M. Ezell is followed by 15 original essays and five responses; our co-authored conclusion takes stock and issues new challenges to scholars of women's book history.
Samuel Richardson in Context. Co-edited with Peter Sabor, Cambridge UP, 2017.
Since the publication of Pamela in 1740, Samuel Richardson has been variously understood as moral crusader, advocate for women, pioneer of the realist novel, and print innovator. Situating his work within these social, intellectual, and material contexts, this new volume of essays identifies his centrality to the emergence of the novel, the self-help book, and the idea of the professional author, as well as his influence on the development of the modern English language, the capitalist economy, and gendered, medicalized, urban, and national identities.
Literary Coteries and the Making of Modern Print in England, 1740-1790. Cambridge UP, 2016.
This book offers the first study of manuscript-producing coteries as an integral element of eighteenth-century Britain's literary culture. I profile four interrelated and influential coteries, focusing on each group's deployment of traditional scribal practices, on key individuals who served as bridges between networks, and on the aesthetic and cultural work performed by the group. The book also explores points of intersection between coteries and the print trade, whether in the form of individuals, publishing events, literary conventions, or remediated texts. Together, these instances demonstrate how scribal modes shaped modern literary production.
Correspondence Primarily on Sir Charles Grandison (1750-54). General editors Peter Sabor and Thomas Keymer, Cambridge UP, 2015. Vol. 10 of the Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson.
Samuel Richardson was a highly regarded printer and influential novelist when he produced his final work of fiction, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753). Covering the period 1750-1754, many of the fully annotated letters in this edition are published from manuscript or in their entirety for the first time. These letters record Richardson’s relationships with leading cultural figures including Samuel Johnson and Elizabeth Carter, his mentorship of other authors, his responses to the Irish “piracy” of his novel, and his exchanges with anonymous fans and critics.
The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge UP, 2005, 2009.
This book studies women who, though often dismissed as didactic and imitative novelists, were actively and ambitiously engaged in a range of innovative publications at the height of the eighteenth century. Using personal correspondence, publication patterns, records of contemporary reception, and sociological models of professionalization, I demonstrate that Frances Sheridan, Frances Brooke, Sarah Scott, Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Fielding, the Minifie sisters, and the early Frances Burney were active and accepted participants in the literary public sphere of the day. I conclude with a speculative examination of their gradual disappearance from literary history.
Reconsidering the Bluestockings, special issue of the Huntington Library Quarterly, co-edited with Nicole Pohl, vol. 65, no. 1/2, 2002.
This is a collection of ten original essays, with an account of the Montague Collection at the Huntington Library, a Bluestocking bibliography, and brief biographical accounts of key Bluestocking women. The co-authored introduction, entitled "A Bluestocking Historiography," examines the varying evaluations of the Bluestockings' literary, cultural, and political significance in their time and in subsequent historical accounts.
Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel. Co-edited with Paul Budra, U of Toronto P, 1998.
Thirteen original essays on the phenomenon of narrative continuation from Homer to The Terminator. The co-authored introduction interprets the sequel as a site where the historically particular and interdependent conditions of creation, production, dissemination, and response are made legible. My essay in this volume examines a number of eighteenth-century sequels by women, suggesting links between their use of the form and their place in the developing market for print.
The Conversational Circle: Rereading the English Novel, 1740-1775. UP of Kentucky, 1996.
This study brings eighteenth-century theories of sociability and conversation to bear on novels which employ structures and tropes of circularity to model a socially conservative ideal of cohesion and consensus. The novels examined include Sarah Fielding's David Simple (the original Adventures and Volume the Last), Samuel Richardson's continuation of Pamela, his final novel Sir Charles Grandison, Henry Fielding's Amelia, Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall, and Tobias Smollett's Humphry Clinker.