A study of the production and circulation of literary manuscripts in Romantic-era Britain

• Offers a detailed examination of the practices of literary manuscript culture, particularly the production, circulation and preservation of manuscripts, based on extensive archival research
• Demonstrates how literary manuscript culture co-evolved with print culture, in a nuanced study of the interactions between the two media
• Examines the changing cultural attitudes towards literary manuscripts, and how these changes affected practices and values
• Surveys the impact of digital media on our access to and understanding of historical manuscripts

This book examines how manuscript practices interacted with an expanding print marketplace to nurture and transform the period’s literary culture. It unearths the alternative histories manuscripts tell us about British Romantic literary culture, describing the practices by which handwritten documents were written, shared, altered and preserved, and explores the functions they served as instruments of expression and sociability. By demonstrating how literary manuscript culture co-evolved with print culture, this study illuminates the complex entanglements between the media of script and print.

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Michelle Levy is Professor of English at Simon Fraser University. She has published extensively on women writers, print and manuscript culture, book history and digital humanities. She also directs the Women’s Print History Project, 1750-1836, a comprehensive bibliographical database of women’s books.