ISBN: 0807868000 9780807868003

Category: History / United States / Colonial Period (1600-1775)

Page count: 664

<i>The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World</i> carries the interrelated stories of publishing, writing, and reading from the beginning of the colonial period in America up to 1790. Three major themes run through the volume: the persisting connections between the book trade in the Old World and the New, evidenced in modes of intellectual and cultural exchange and the dominance of imported, chiefly English books; the gradual emergence of a competitive book trade in which newspapers were the largest form of production; and the institution of a “culture of the Word,” organized around an essentially theological understanding of print, authorship, and reading, complemented by other frameworks of meaning that included the culture of republicanism. <i>The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World</i> also traces the histories of literary and learned culture, censorship and “freedom of the press,” and literacy and orality.<br><br><br><br>Contributors:<br>Hugh Amory<br>Ross W. Beales, The College of the Holy Cross<br>John Bidwell, Princeton University Library<br>Richard D. Brown, University of Connecticut<br>Charles E. Clark, University of New Hampshire<br>James N. Green, Library Company of Philadelphia<br>David D. Hall, Harvard Divinity School<br>Russell L. Martin, Southern Methodist University<br>E. Jennifer Monaghan, Brooklyn College of The City University of New York<br>James Raven, University of Essex<br>Elizabeth Carroll Reilly, Hardwick, Massachusetts<br>A. Gregg Roeber, Pennsylvania State University<br>David S. Shields, University of South Carolina<br>Calhoun Winton, University of Maryland