Studies in Ephemera Text and Image in Eighteenth-Century Print

This book brings together the voices of both well-established and emerging scholars of Early Modern print culture to offer new, interdisciplinary approaches to ephemeral works. These include chapbooks, pamphlets, cheap decorative prints, and importantly, broadside ballads. Such works were central to the visual and literary cultures of Early Modern England and North America, but their infrequent survival has meant that their importance has not been recognized. These essays show that ephemeral print does not only call for analysis, but for new modes of interpretation that attend to the complex ways in which these works-often characterized as simple or even crude-in fact communicated through a sophisticated interchange between the textual and visual. Moreover, these works were topical and addressed the foremost political, social and cultural issues of their day. This book offers ways of understanding ephemeral print that will inspire subsequent studies of a wide variety of compelling ephemeral works.