This book describes the living-room artifacts, clothing styles, and intellectual proclivities of American classes from top to bottom.

A new interdisciplinary interest has risen to study interconnections between oral tradition and book culture. In addition to the use and dissemination of printed books, newspapers etc., book culture denotes manuscript media and the circulation of written documents of oral tradition in and through the archive, into published collections. Book culture also intertwines the process of framing and defining oral genres with literary interests and ideologies. The present volume is highly relevant to anyone interested in oral cultures and their relationship to the culture of writing and publishing. The questions discussed include the following: How have printing and book publishing set terms for oral tradition scholarship? How have the practices of reading affected the circulation of oral traditions? Which books and publishing projects have played a key role in this and how? How have the written representations of oral traditions, as well as the roles of editors and publishers, introduced authorship to materials customarily regarded as anonymous and collective?

Excerpt from Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, Vol. 2 A forest huge of spears and thronging helms Appear'd, and serried shields, in thick array. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This is a guide to the main developments in the history of British and Irish literature, charting some of the main features of literary language development and highlighting key language topics.

This study focuses on the complex relations between author, publisher and contemporary reading public in 19th-century America; in particular, the emergence of Irving and Cooper as America's first successful literary entrepreneurs, how Poe's and Melville's successes and failures affected their writing, the popularization of poetry in the 1830s and 1840s, the role of the literary magazine in the 1840s and 1850s, and the beginnings of book promotion. It pays particular attention to the way social and economic forces helped to shape literary works.