Book History and Literacies
at Minnesota

IN RECENT YEARS more than a dozen faculty members, graduate students, and other associates of the Department of English at the University of Minnesota have advanced research in areas related to book history as well as to cultural and social conditions for literacy. This page documents some of their undertakings in this field.
    For information about the many institutions at the University and elsewhere in Minnesota that encourage such research, click here.

Except as noted, the Department of English is the site of the teaching appointment or the academic degree mentioned.

Thomas Augst, Associate Professor

• “The Family Bible, Deluxe Edition” (review of Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America). Boston Book Review 3 (1996).
• “Making Society out of Books: Character, Self-Fashioning, and the Rhetoric of Market Culture in Nineteenth-Century America.” Dissertation, Harvard University, 1997.
• “The Business of Reading in Nineteenth-Century America: The New York Mercantile Library.” American Quarterly 50 (1998): 267–305.
• The Clerk's Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

 

• “English Dictionary Definitions of ‘Emblem’ and ‘Device’ from Elyot to Johnson.” Emblematica 4 (1989): 177–99.
• “Chiron the Educator.” Emblems in Glasgow: A Collection of Essays Drawing on the Stirling Maxwell Collection in Glasgow University Library. Ed. Alison Adams. Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1992. 1–24.
• “Whitney’s Education Emblems.” The Emblem in Renaissance and Baroque Europe: Tradition and Variety. Ed. Alison Adams and Anthony J. Harper. Symbola et Emblemata 3. Leiden: Brill, 1992. 118–31.
• “Childhood Education in Emblem Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” Emblematica 7 (1993).
• “Some Pedagogical Uses of the Emblem in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England.” Emblematica 7 (1993): 1–22.
• Ed., with Edward Griffin and Austin McLean. The Telling Image: Explorations in the Emblem. AMS Studies in the Emblem 12. New York: AMS Press, 1996.
• “Hercules in Emblem Books.” Telling Image 69–95.
• The Virtual Museum of Education Iconics (2000). Web site including pages devoted to the influential illustrated textbook Orbis Sensualium Pictus (1658), and to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century emblem books.
• “A False Caxton ‘Embleme’ in the OED.” Word and Image 18 (2002): 123-25.

 

• Ed., with David Pearson. Perspectives on Literacy. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1979.
• Ed., with Judith Green, Michael Kamil, and Tim Shanahan. Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Literacy Research. Urbana, IL: National Conference on Research in English and National Council of Teachers of English, 1992. 2nd ed. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, forthcoming.
• A Teacher’s Introduction to Theories of Response to Literature. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1993.
• “Critical Discourse Theory and Reader Response: How Discourses Constitute Reader Stances and Social Contexts,” Reader 37 (1997), 1–26.
• “Reading and Responding at the Level of Activity.” Journal of Literacy Research 32 (2000), 237–52.
• “Using Media-Ethnographies to Study Response to Media as Activity.” Reconceptualizing Literacy in the Media Age. Ed. Ann Watts Pailliotet and Peter Mosenthal. Advances in Reading/Language Research 7. Stamford, CT: JAI-Ablex, 2000. 3–40.
• With Jamie Myers. “Hypermedia Authoring as Critical Literacy.” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 44 (2001): 538-65.
• With Lee Galda. “Theory and Research into Practice: Response to Literature as a Cultural Activity.” Reading Research Quarterly 36 (2001): 64-73.

 

• “The Work of the Image: The Plates of the Encyclopédie.” Stanford French Review 8 (1984): 229–44.
The Discourse of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France: Diderot and the Art of Philosophizing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Ed., with Juli Candlier Hayes. Using the Encyclopédie: Ways of Knowing, Ways of Reading. SVEC 5. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2002.
“Constructing Philosophers.” Using the Encyclopédie 21-35.

• The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Awarded the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book, 2001.
• “Print and Everyday Life in the Eighteenth Century.” Perspectives on American Book History: Artifacts and Commentary. Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book. Ed. Scott Casper, Joanne Chaison, and Jeff Groves. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. 47-78.
• “Children of Media, Children as Media: Optical Telegraphs, Indian Pupils, and Joseph Lancaster’s System for Cultural Replication.” New Media, 1750–1914. Media in Transition. Ed. Lisa Gitelman and Geoff Pingree. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. 61-90.

 

• Annotated Bibliography: Electronic Preservation and the Artifactual Materiality of the Text (1996).
• With Sarah Wadsworth. “The Commercial History of a Penny Magazine,” by Charles Knight (unsigned). Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge 2 (1833). Hypertext edition of a detailed exposition of early-nineteenth-century printing practices, written by a leading publisher and social reformer. For details about the preparation of this edition see Laura K. Dickinson and Sarah A. Wadsworth, “The Making (and Remaking) of the Penny Magazine: An Electronic Edition of Charles Knight’s ‘The Commercial History of a Penny Magazine,’” Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 72 (1997): 289–97.
 

• “The Rise of Romantic Professionalism: William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.” Dissertation, Indiana University, 1995.
• “Romantic Professionalism in 1800: Robert Southey, Herbert Croft, and the Letters and Legacy of Thomas Chatterton.” ELH 63 (1996): 681–706.
• “‘Ministry More Palpable’: William Wordsworth and the Making of Romantic Professionalism.” Studies in Romanticism 36 (1997): 327–47.
• “‘A Sea Reflecting Love: Tennyson, Shelley, and the Aesthetics of the Image in the Marketplace.”Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History 59 (1998): 71–97.
•  “Black Gates and Fiery Galleries: Eastern Architecture in The Fall of Hyperion.” Studies in Romanticism 39 (2000): 229–54.

 

• Ed., with Ayers Bagley and Austin McLean. The Telling Image: Explorations in the Emblem. AMS Studies in the Emblem 12. New York: AMS Press, 1996.
• “Cincinnatus and the ‘Shaw Memorial’: Monument as Emblem in Saint Gaudens, Dunbar, and Lowell.” Telling Image 171–205.

 

• “Toward Consistency in Visual Information: Standardized Icons Based on Task.” Technical Communication 39 (1992): 33–37.
• With Nancy L. Bayer. “Making Gender Visible: Applying Feminist Critiques of Technology to Technical Communication.” Technical Communication Quarterly 3 (1994): 257–70.
• “Technology, Community, and Technical Communication on the Internet.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 10 (1996): 81–99.
• Persuasion and Privacy in Cyberspace: The Online Protests over Lotus Marketplace and Clipper Chip. New Haven, CT : Yale University Press, 1997.
• “Technical Communication, Copyright, and the Shrinking Public Domain.” Computers and Composition 14 (1997): 329–42.
• With Christine Silker. “Technical Communication Research Methods: From Traditional to Virtual.” Technical Communication Quarterly 6 (Winter 1997): 403–18.
• With James P. Zappen and Stephen Doheny-Farina. “Rhetoric, Community, and Cyberspace.” Rhetoric Review 15 (1997): 400–19.
• “The Promise and the Peril of Social Action in Cyberspace: Ethos, Delivery, and the Protests over Marketplace and the Clipper Chip.” Communities in Cyberspace. Ed. Marc A. Smith and  Peter Kollock. London:  Routledge, 1999.
• With Lee-Ann Kastman. “Conducting Technical Communication Research via the Internet: Guidelines for Privacy, Permissions, and Ownership in Educational
• Research.”  Technical Communication 46 (1999).
• Oral Presentations for Technical Communication. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000.
• With John M. Lannon. A Concise Guide to Technical Communication. New York: Longman, 2001. 2nd ed. 2004.
• Cyberliteracy: Navigating the Internet with Awareness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.

 

• The Tenniel Illustrations to the Alice Books. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985.
• “Bagpipe and Distaff: Interpreting Dictionary Illustrations.” Dictionaries 10 (1988): 93–109.
• “Bailey and After: Illustrating Meaning.” Word and Image 8 (1992): 1–20.
• British Periodicals at Minnesota: The Early Nineteenth Century (1995). Chronological handlist, with index.
• “Illustrations” (part of a forum, “Centennial Celebration of The Century Dictionary”). Dictionaries 17 (1996): 79–115.
• “Tenniel’s Allegorical Cartoons.” Telling Image 139–70.
• “Definition, Pictorial Illustration, and Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding.” Eleventh Biennial Meeting, Dictionary Society of North America. University of Wisconsin, Madison, 30 May 1997.
• “Gazing at The Imperial Dictionary.” Book History 1 (1998): 156–81.
• “Reading the Visual Text: A Christmas Carol.” Yale University Library Gazette 74 (1999): 21–40.
• “Words and Pictures: Goodman vs. Gombrich.” Twelfth Biennial Meeting, Dictionary Society of North America. University of California–Berkeley, 27–29 May 1999.
• “Stealing Dickens’s Child: Parley’s Illuminated Library and A Christmas Carol.” Annual Conference (“Victorian Encounters: Editors, Publishers, and Readers”), Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP). Birkbeck College, University of London, 20–22 July 2000.
• “From Street Ballad to Penny Magazine: ‘March of Intellect In the Butchering Line.’” Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities. Ed. Laurel Brake, David Finkelstein, and Bill Bell. Basingstoke, Eng.: Palgrave, 2000. 93–103.
• “An Imagined World: The Imperial Gazetteer.” Divided Selves: The British Press and Imperial Co-Histories. Ed. Julie Codell. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003. 45–67.
• “Littera scripta manet: Blackstone and Electronic Text.” Studies in Bibliography 54 (2001 [2003]): 115–32.
• “The Number Trade at Blackie and Son.” Publishing History 55 (2004): 37–67.
• “Familiar Quotations.” Harvard Library Bulletin, n.s. 14 (2003 [2004]): 13–53.
 

• “The Fidelity of the Text and Illustrations of Selected Danish Children’s Diction Translated and Published in Great Britain and the United States, Excluding Works by Hans Christian Andersen.” Dissertation, School of Library Science, University of Minnesota, 1975.
• “Resources for Study of Black Children’s Literature at the University of Minnesota.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 13 (1988): 87–88.
• Wanda Gag. New York: Twayne, 1994.
• “Scandinavian Writer/Illustrator: Bicultural Contribution to American Children’s Literature.” Aspects and Issues in the History of Children’s Literature 60 (1995): 89–95.
• “Sources for Research on Nancy Drew.” Rediscovering Nancy Drew. Ed. Carolyn Stewart Dyer and Nancy Tillman Romalov. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995. 181–86.
• “The Kerlan Collection.” The Lion and the Unicorn 22 (1998): 319–22.

 

• Review of David Aers and Lynn Staley, The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture. Speculum 73 (1998): 142–43.
• Review of Anne Hudson and Pamela Gradon, English Wycliffite Sermons, vols. 4 and 5. Speculum 74 (1999): 420–21.
• “New Books about Women and Writing” (review essay). Feminist Teacher 13 (1999–2000).
• Reading Families: Women’s Literate Practice in Fifteenth-Century England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002.

 

• “Performing the American Nineteenth-Century Novel: Readers and the Cultural Construction of Meaning.” Dissertation, 1994.
• Ed., with Lane Stiles. Reading Books: Essays on the Material Text and Literature in America. Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book. Amherst, MA: University of Massachustts Press, 1996.
• “Materiality as Performance: The Forming of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona.” Reading Books 223–27.

 

• “Americans Abroad: A Bibliographical Study of American Travel Literature, 1625–1800.” Dissertation, Program in American Studies, University of Minnesota, 1975.
• Ed. with William McPheron, Stephen Lehmann, and Craig Likness. English and American literature: Sources and Strategies for Collection Development. ACRL Publications in Librarianship. Chicago: American Library Association, 1987.
• With Pollyanna Holland. Black African Literature. Library Guides in International Studies 12. Minneapolis, MN: Institute of International Studies and Wilson Library, Humanities/Social Sciences Libraries, University of Minnesota, 1989
• With Jon Pankake. A Prairie Home Companion Folk Song Book. New York: Viking, 1988. Rpt. London: Faber and Faber, 1989; New York: Penguin, 1990.
A Prairie Home Commonplace Book: 25 Years On the Air With Garrison Keillor. St. Paul, MN: HighBridge Company, 1999.

• “Aids for Editing Walden.” Computers and the Humanities 15 (1981), 155–62.
• With Stephen Adams. Revising Mythologies: The Composition of Thoreau’s Major Works. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988.
• “Prospects for Writers’ Workstations in the Coming Decade.” Evolving Perspectives on Computers and Composition Studies: Questions for the 1990s. Ed. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1991. 84–110.
• Ed., with Jim Schramer. American Travel Writers, 1776–1850. Dictionary of Literary Biography Series 183. Detroit: Gale Research, 1997.
• Ed., with Jim Schramer. American Travel Writers, 1850–1900. Dictionary of Literary Biography Series 189, Detroit: Gale Research, 1998.
• Work in progress: a study of famous American travel writers who went to England in the 1840s and 1850s, with special attention to their publishing history, and interactions with each other and with their publishers.

 

• Ed., with Michele Moylan. Reading Books: Essays on the Material Text and Literature in America. Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book. Amherst, MA: University of Massachustts Press, 1996.
• “Packaging Literature for the High Schools: From the Riverside Literature Series to Literature and Life.” Reading Books 248–75.

 

• Traces of War: Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of the Union. Parallax: Re-Visions of Culture and Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.
• “Photography and the Museum of Rome in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun.” Photo-Textualities: Reading Photographs and Literature. Ed. Marsha Bryant. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1996. 25–42.

 

• “The Transatlantic Context: Walter Scott and Nineteenth-Century American Literary History.” Dissertation, 1999.
• “Walter Scott and the Nineteenth-Century American Literary Marketplace: Antebellum Richmond Readers and the Collected Editions of the Waverley Novels.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 93 (1999): 495–517. (Awarded a Virginia Library History Award for 2000.)

 

• “Bernard Shaw and His Biographer.” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 17 (1994): 339–66.
• With Laura K. Dickinson. “The Commercial History of a Penny Magazine,” by Charles Knight (unsigned). Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge 2 (1833). Hypertext edition of a detailed exposition of early-nineteenth-century printing practices, written by a leading publisher and social reformer. For details about the preparation of this edition see Laura K. Dickinson and Sarah A. Wadsworth, “The Making (and Remaking) of the Penny Magazine: An Electronic Edition of Charles Knight’s ‘The Commercial History of a Penny Magazine,’” Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 72 (1997): 289–97.
• “Getting Graphic: Influences of the Graphical User Interface on the Design of Instructional Texts.” TEXT Technology: The Journal of Computer Text Processing 6 (1996): 108–27.
• “Book Publishing in the Eighteenth Century.” History of the Mass Media in the United States: An Encyclopedia. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishing, 1998. 66–68.
• “Charles Knight and Sir Francis Bond Head: Two Early Victorian Perspectives on Printing and the Allied Trades.” Victorian Periodicals Review 31 (1998): 369–86.
• “Reading the Marketplace: The Culture of the Book in Nineteenth-Century America.” Dissertation, 2000.
• “Nathaniel Hawthorne, Samuel Goodrich, and the Transformation of the Juvenile Fiction Market.”  Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 26 (2000): 1–24.
• “A Blue and Gold Mystique: Reading the Material Text in Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Pansies’ and Ticknor and Fields’s Blue and Gold Series.” Harvard Library Bulletin, n.s. 11 (2000): 55-80.
• “Louisa May Alcott, William T. Adams, and the Rise of Gender-Specific Series Books.” The Lion and the Unicorn 25 (2001): 17-46.

 

• Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales. London: Heinemann, 1979.
• Victorian Fairy Tales: The Revolt of the Fairies and Elves. New York: Methuen, 1987.
• The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World. New York: Routledge, 1988. 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
• Fairy Tale as Myth / Myth as Fairy Tale. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994.
• Creative Storytelling: Building Community, Changing Lives. New York: Routledge, 1995.
• Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry. New York: Routledge, 1997.
• When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and their Tradition. New York: Routledge, 1999.
• Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children’s Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter. New York: Routledge, 2000.
• Ed., The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Co-editor, The Lion and the Unicorn.

 

¶ For information about the many institutions at the University and elsewhere in Minnesota that encourage research in book history and literacies, click here.

The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author. The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by the University of Minnesota.