Mark my words: profiles of punctuation in modern literature
“The pace at which this world unfolds is supervised by punctuation.” — Fredric Jameson
Mark My Words is a brief book on punctuation, style, and modern literature. Most writers are not notable for their punctuation, but more than a handful of the major figures in modern literature have signature styles that are defined by their punctuation choices.
Why are Emily Dickinson and Henry James (as well as Laurence Sterne) drawn habitually to dashes? Why is Cormac McCarthy a fan of commas and question marks, which William Carlos Williams tends to ignore? And why is that odd couple, the novelist Virginia Woolf and the short story specialist Andre Dubus II, devoted to semicolons (along, as it happens, with Flaubert)? Why do E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Nikki Giovanni prefer no punctuation at all? More importantly, what effect do such nonverbal marks have on the author’s vision? Lee Clark Mitchell unpicks what such preferences imply, showing that each form of punctuation serves a singular thematic end.
The first book on modern literature to compare writers’ use of punctuation, and to show how fully typographical marks alter our sense of authorial styles, Mark My Words offers new ways of reading some of our most important and beloved writers as well as new perspectives on literary style itself.
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Engaging the age of Jane Austen: public humanities in practice
Humanities scholars, in general, often have a difficult time explaining to others why their work matters, and eighteenth-century literary scholars are certainly no exception. To help remedy this problem, literary scholars Bridget Draxler and Danielle Spratt offer this collection of essays to defend the field’s relevance and demonstrate its ability to help us better understand current events, from the proliferation of media to ongoing social justice battles.
The result is a book that offers a range of approaches to engaging with undergraduates, non-professionals, and broader publics into an appreciation of eighteenth-century literature. Essays draw on innovative projects ranging from a Jane Austen reading group held at the public library to students working with an archive to digitize an overlooked writer’s novel.
Reminding us that the eighteenth century was an exhilarating age of lively political culture—marked by the rise of libraries and museums, the explosion of the press, and other platforms for public intellectual debates—Draxler and Spratt provide a book that will not only be useful to eighteenth-century scholars, but can also serve as a model for other periods as well. This book will appeal to librarians, archivists, museum directors, scholars, and others interested in digital humanities in the public life.
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