- State College, PA
- Pennsylvania State University, English, Faculty MemberPennsylvania State University, University Libraries, Faculty Memberadd
- English, History, 17th Century British (Literature), Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Literature, 18th & 19th Centuries, Material Culture Studies, and 21 more18th Century British Literature, History of the Novel, History of Subjectivity, Theory of the Novel, Landscape Architecture, Garden History, Landscape History, History of Science and Technology, Space and Place, Phenomenology of Space and Place, Consumption and Material Culture, History of clothing and fashion, Visual Culture, Embodied knowledge, History of Architecture, Environmental Cognition, Thing Theory, Domestic Space, Materiality, Eighteenth-Century literature, and Embodimentedit
- Paterno Family Librarian for Literature and Professor of English, Pennsylvania State University. Author of My Dark Ro... morePaterno Family Librarian for Literature and Professor of English, Pennsylvania State University. Author of My Dark Room (University of Chicago Press, 2023) and The Self and It (Stanford University Press, 2010).edit
Promotional flyer and summary for My Dark Room with 30% discount code from the University of Chicago Press. Expires September 1, 2024
Research Interests: Eighteenth-Century literature, British Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Eighteenth-Century British History and Culture, Automata, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Literature, and 11 moreHistory of the Novel, Consumption and Material Culture, Fetishism, Frances Burney, Objects, Puppets, Samuel Richardson, Eighteenth Century Studies, Charlotte Charke, Novelty, and Dolls
This article redefines life writing to encompass the very forms used for recordkeeping in eighteenth‐century commonplace books, in the flow of life as it happened, primarily through the lines of grids used in indexes for separating pieces... more
This article redefines life writing to encompass the very forms used for recordkeeping in eighteenth‐century commonplace books, in the flow of life as it happened, primarily through the lines of grids used in indexes for separating pieces of information and designating subject headings. These lines, which functioned as inscriptional marks that required graphic literacy to use, help broaden the conception of manuscript (“written by hand”) to include media other than words formed on a page. John Locke's index‐based system for designing commonplace books, devised in A New Method of Making Common‐Place Books, as well as various examples of eighteenth‐century manuscript commonplace books will be the main objects of focus.
Appears in The Manuscript Book in the Long Eighteenth Century, special issue edited by Alexis Chema and Betty Schellenberg, Eighteenth-Century Life, 48 (1): 72–91, January 2024
Appears in The Manuscript Book in the Long Eighteenth Century, special issue edited by Alexis Chema and Betty Schellenberg, Eighteenth-Century Life, 48 (1): 72–91, January 2024
Research Interests: History of the Book, British Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture, John Locke, Manuscripts & Material Culture, Manuscript Cultures, and 9 moreCommonplace Books, Life Writing, Index, Miscellanies and commonplace books, Graphic Literacy, Material Textuality, Autobiography and life writing studies, Textual Materiality, and History of Subjectivity
Memoir essay on my experience of writing My Dark Room.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/inside-my-dark-room/
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/inside-my-dark-room/
Julie Park and Adam Smyth invite proposals for essays to be included in an edited collection on the long history of the extra-illustrated book. Deadline August 31, 2023
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This chapter examines the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century transformation of the cottage from a type of domestic dwelling once associated with the poor into a fashionable architectural medium for projecting interiority and... more
This chapter examines the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century transformation of the cottage from a type of domestic dwelling once associated with the poor into a fashionable architectural medium for projecting interiority and the affective and physical state of being known as comfort. How did the cottage transform from a “mean habitation” (Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language, 1755) to a place of abundant “comfort” and “smiles” (James Malton, An Essay on British Architecture, 1798) by the end of the eighteenth century? How did this particular domestic site function as a socially inflected medium for the imagination itself? By considering socioeconomic conditions, cottage designs in pattern books, and new cultural standards of comfort, this essay will shed light on the persistence of the imagination as a historical shaping agent in late eighteenth-century conceptions and designs of the cottage. Ultimately it argues that the cottage is an architectural artifact that reveals the critical roles of interiority and the imagination in late eighteenth-century England's conceptions of home.
Appearing in At Home in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Stephen Hague and Karen Lipsedge (Routledge, 2021)
Appearing in At Home in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Stephen Hague and Karen Lipsedge (Routledge, 2021)
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How was narrative point of view developed through an optical device? In between Richardson's publication of Pamela in 1740 and Fielding's publication of Tom Jones in 1749, a device known as the zograscope first appeared in England in... more
How was narrative point of view developed through an optical device? In between Richardson's publication of Pamela in 1740 and Fielding's publication of Tom Jones in 1749, a device known as the zograscope first appeared in England in 1745. Whether appearing as a tabletop mirror or a wooden box, the zograscope allowed its users to see the world in three dimensions and in color from the comfort of home or in crowded venues. An understanding of psychological perspective as it was developed in eighteenthcentury novels, and optical perspective as it was created by the zograscope, are incomplete without relating them to each other. They are equally identifiable as forms of narrative perspective, and demonstrate how text and image, and their materialities, came to interpenetrate each other in modern conceptions of point of view.
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Introduction for Getting Perspective, a special issue of Word & Image, 37:3 (2021)
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from AI Narratives, ed. Cave, Dihal, Dillon. Oxford UP, 2020.
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In Reenactment Studies Handbook, ed. Agnew, Lamb and Tomann. Routledge, 2020.
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From Organic Supplements, ed. Jacobson and Park, University of Virginia Press, 2020
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Revisiting Richardson's _Pamela_ as a site of "spatial formalism," this essay maintains that the notion of the domestic interior as a setting conducive to psychological interiority requires further materialist analysis. The interiority... more
Revisiting Richardson's _Pamela_ as a site of "spatial formalism," this essay maintains that the notion of the domestic interior as a setting conducive to psychological interiority requires further materialist analysis. The interiority of _Pamela_ hinges less on characters' emotions than on its ability to move between different spatial interiors, from the of-cited interiors of domestic architecture to the interiors of spaces that initially register as objects, such as women's detachable pockets as well as books and letters. Ultimately, Pamela lays claim to her selfhood through effecting a dynamic whereby her movable possessions--her letters and her pockets in particular--become spatial territories of the self that challenge the authority of land ownership conferred to her social superiors. She effects, in other words, a shift in social relations as defined by property as well as by marriage through her ability to transform the interiority afforded by her everyday possessions into a movable estate of the self.
Research Interests: Gender Studies, Eighteenth-Century literature, Material Culture Studies, The Novel, Privacy, and 28 moreHistory of Costume, Domesticity, British Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Eighteenth-Century British History and Culture, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Literature, Epistolary literature, English Novel, 18th Century British Literature, History of Private Life, History of Everyday Life, Domestic Space, Spatial Theory, 18th Century, Material Culture, Epistolary Novel, Interiority, English domestic interiors, Mobility, Eighteenth-Century British Literature, Samuel Richardson, Costume history, Eighteenth-Century Novel, Eighteenth Century Studies, Material Culture of Domesticity, Private Property, History of Subjectivity, Letter-writing, and Eighteenth Century English Novel
From Interiors and Interiority, ed. Ewa Lajer-Burcharth and Beate Söntgen (De Gruyter, 2015). http://www.degruyter.com/viewbooktoc/product/246249