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c h a p t e r 3 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the Circuits of Abolitionist Poetry meredith l. mcgill Can attention to the format of printed works change how we think about the history of literary genres, in particular, the history of poetic genres? Judging by the paucity of book history scholarship devoted to American poetry (despite its cultural prestige), and the lack of attention given to print culture by scholars of American poetry (outside of that which is lavished on our great printer-poet, Walt Whitman), one is tempted to conclude that the materiality of the printed poem is largely immaterial to how we understand its significance . Over the past thirty years or so, book history has done much to reshape the large-scale narratives of American literary history, providing nuanced accounts of literary authorship, publishing, and reading. Such accounts are, however, generally treated as external to histories of poetic form, which continue to be told as a set of relations between and among texts, and not books, institutions, practices, markets, systems of exchange, or media. Is there something about poetry in general and lyric poetry in particular that produces transhistorical, dematerialized ways of reading? Will the uptake of book history into the discipline of media history—prompted in part by the remediation of large swaths of the printed record into easily searchable, digitally transmitted PDF images—pull the study of material texts even further away from the concerns of those of us who attend to histories of poetic form? In her groundbreaking work Dickinson’s Misery, Virginia Jackson surveys recent digital editions of Emily Dickinson, wondering if, for all of their promise of new approaches to Dickinson’s work, these digital editions don’t 54 meredith l. mcgill in the end offer us simply more of the same. Praising the new forms of access granted by the Dickinson Electronic Archive, Jackson nonetheless asks: “But will it change our reading of Dickinson’s genre—or will readers still go to the Web as they have to the print editions in order to read more Dickinson poems ? Won’t readers still view—because they already expect to view—these poems as lyrics? Will the medium of the Internet have any effect on the imaginary lyric model that has guided the editing and interpretation of Dickinson for so long?” To Jackson’s disappointment, genre seems to trump medium , returning us again and again to lyric reading. But must genre always trump medium? Does medium matter for the study of poetry, and if so how? Some of the difficulty in bringing these disciplines into closer relation stems from literary studies’ and book and media history’s often incommensurate periodizations and striking differences of scale in their address to their objects. From the perspective of media history, the concerns of literary criticism—modes of address, experiments in form, meter, or genre, differences between early and late style, the ebb and flow of literary movements— can seem small, even trifling. From the perspective of literary criticism, the concerns of media history—the life cycle of a medium, from novelty to viability and widespread adoption; the tension between innovation and standardization , dissemination and centralized control—can seem too broad and too remote from what matters about works of art that matter. The micromeasures of literary time—the impact of first printings, the efflorescence of styles or “isms,” even the spans of authors’ lives—can feel out of sync and out of scale with the slow time and transnational consequences of media shift. Poetry compounds the difficulty of bringing media history and literary history into satisfying relation. Poetry has a long history of claiming multimedia status—threatening to overwhelm sense with sound, offering a different way of seeing, and toying with our consciousness of page (or screen). Poetry has promised to serve as tape recorder, jukebox, Auto-Tune, or synthesizer , while also competing for primacy with painting, illustration, photography , and other visual arts. Poetry’s claim to be an aural and a visual as well as a verbal art makes it difficult to wrestle poetic history into the sequential narratives of media history, narratives that tend to proceed as if there were only one medium per epoch: handwriting, print, photography, film, radio, television, Internet. Can we imagine a book history or media history finely grained and supple enough to recognize the interventions in these histories made by poems and poetic genres? How...

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