Free and open to the public.
Meredith L. McGill is a Professor of English at Rutgers University.
This talk argues that the disciplinary norm of keying literary criticism to the publication of books has served antebellum American poetry especially poorly, encouraging critics to claim a cultural independence that is belied by American poetry's conditions of circulation and forcing Americanists to veer uncomfortably between overpraise and apology. Newspaper digitization projects permit us to re-approach antebellum verse not in nationalist terms but as key to a vibrant provincial literacy culture, one that was primarily conducted regionally in cheap formats such as newspapers, weekly literary magazines, and pamphlets. In this talk, I'll sketch how reorienting ourselves to the circulation of poetry outside of books alters the literary- critical terrain, requiring us to attune ourselves to different kinds of poetic value and asking us to reconsider the nature of democratic poetics.
Meredith L. McGill's research and teaching focuses on American literature, book, and media history , and poetry and poetics. She is the author of American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1837-1853 (2003; repr. 2007) a study of nineteenth-century American resistance to tight control over intellectual property. She has edited two collections of essays: Taking Liberties with the Author (2013), which explores the persistence of the author as a shaping force in literary criticism , and The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange (2008), in which a variety of scholars model ways of understanding nineteenth-century poetry with a transatlantic frame.