Urania’s Inversion: Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, and the Strange History of Women Scientists in Nineteenth‐Century America

Signs ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-99
Author(s):  
Renée L. Bergland
Author(s):  
Richard Parker

I will begin this paper with a brief and partial history of American printing, detecting a shared predilection for a noticeably maverick relation to the printed page in the works (printed and otherwise) of Samuel Keimer and Benjamin Franklin during the colonial period, and the works of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain in the nineteenth-century. I term the interrupted, dialectical printing that connects all of these writer/printers ‘not-printing’, and offer some explanation of his term and a description of some of its manifestations. I will then move on to consider how the idea of ‘not-printing’ might be helpful for the consideration of some contemporary British and American poets and printers before concluding with a description of some of the ways that the productive constraints of such a practice have influenced my own work as editor and printer at the Crater Press. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14195/2182-8830_2-1_2


2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (03) ◽  
pp. 828-849
Author(s):  
Catherine L. Evans

Susanna L. Blumenthal’sLaw and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture(2016) is a history of the self in nineteenth-century America. When judges considered a person’s criminal responsibility or civil capacity in court, they created a body of legal and political thought about the self, society, the economy, and American democracy. This essay uses Blumenthal’s book to explore recent work on law and the mind in Britain and North America, and argues that abstract questions about free will, the self, and the mind were part of the everyday jurisprudence of the nineteenth century. Debates about responsibility were also debates about the psychological consequences of capitalism and the borders of personhood and citizenship at a time of rapid economic, political, and social change.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document