Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Reprinting and the Embodied Book

Jessica DeSpain examines reprints by Charles Dickens, Susan Warner, Fanny Kemble and Walt Whitman to theorize the ongoing transatlantic transformation of texts that took place before adoption of the Chace Act of 1891. As authors, readers, and publishers struggled with the unpredictability of the textual body, the physical book and the physical body became metaphors of flux, and discourses of destabilized bodies inflected issues essential to transatlantic culture, including class, gender, religion and slavery.