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Books by Paul C. Gutjahr
Popular American Literature of the 19th Century /
Illuminating Letters /
An American
Bible
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An American
Bible
A History of the Good
Book
in the United States, 1777-1880
By Paul C. Gutjahr
Reviews
During the first
three-quarters of the nineteenth century, American publishing
experienced unprecedented, exponential growth. An emerging
market economy, widespread religious revival, educational
reforms, and innovations in print technology worked together to
create a culture increasingly formed and framed by the power of
print. At the center of this new culture was the Bible, the book
that has been called “the best seller” in American
publishing history. Yet it is important to realize that the
Bible in America was not a simple, uniform entity. First printed
in the United States during the American Revolution, the Bible
underwent many revisions, translations, and changes in format as
different editors and publishers appropriated it to meet a wide
range of changing ideological and economic demands.
This book examines how many different constituencies (both
secular and religious) fought to keep the Bible the preeminent
text in the United States as the country’s print marketplace
experienced explosive growth. The author shows how these heated
battles had profound consequences for many American cultural
practices and forms of printed material. By exploring how
publishers, clergymen, politicians, educators, and lay persons
met the threat that new printed material posed to the dominance
of the Bible by changing both its form and its contents, the
author reveals the causes and consequences of mutating God’s
supposedly immutable Word.—from The Publisher
Paul Gutjahr's
An American
Bible is a learned, judicious, and
readable study of the production and marketing of the biggest
all-time best-seller during the first century following American
independence. As such, not only is this book by far the most
authoritative study of its particular subject, but a valuable
window onto the whole history of American publishing and
marketing during the period.—Lawrence Buell, Harvard University
A Fascinating journey through the history of the Bible in
America -- unprecedented in its scope, erudition, and
imagination.—Jon Butler, Yale University
An extremely compelling piece of cultural history that succeeds
in making rich rather than schematic sense of the major dramas
that lay behind the production of over 1700 different American
editions of the Bible in the century after the American
Revolution. Describing its larger subject as 'the mutability of
the immutable book,' Gutjahr offers accounts of the changing
technologies of production, discussions of the relation of image
to text, case studies of major printers and printings (and the
cultural, economic, theological and textual issues that
occasioned those editions), and a critical analysis of the
battles of publishers in promoting the Bible as a distinct
marketplace object. Gutjahr's book is especially powerful in
demonstrating how 19th-century efforts to purge the Bible of
textual and translational impurities in search of an 'authentic'
text, led ironically to the emergence of entirely new gospels
for the nineteenth century like the Book of Mormon and the
massive fictionalized literature dealing with the life of
Christ.
An American
Bible deserves the widest possible audience.—Jay Fliegelman, Stanford University
Paul Gutjahr's pathbreaking study of the production of bibles in
the early history of the United States is a splendid effort in
every way. The great magnitude of the subject has frightened
other scholars away. But Gutjahr, unintimidated by the many
dimensions of his theme, has successfully illuminated a great
deal about printing practices in early America, about the
economics of the book trade, and about the vicissitudes of
American taste, as well as about the religious meanings of the
printed Scriptures.—Mark Noll, Wheaton College
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Table
Figures
Preface 1
1 Production 9
2 Packaging 39
3 Purity 89
4 Pedagogy 113
5 Popularity 143
Postscript 175
App. 1 An Overview of Bible Production in the United States,
1777-1880 181
App. 2 American Bible Society (ABS) Production and Distribution,
1818-1880 187
App. 3 Prices for the Cheapest Editions of American Bibles in
the Nineteenth Century 189
App. 4 Survey of Bible Bindings from the American Bible Society
(1,238-edition sample) 191
App. 5 New Translations of the English Bible in the United
States, 1808-1880 193
App. 6 Production of Catholic Bibles in English in the United
States, 1790-1880 195
Notes 199
Bibliography 229
Index 253
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| Paul Gutjahr is an Associate
Professor of English, American Studies and Religious Studies at Indiana University. He works primarily on
religious print culture in the United States, having written extensively on
sacred texts in America, as well as popular Christian fiction such as Ben-Hur:
A Tale of the Christ and the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry
Jenkins. His books include: An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in
the United States, Illuminating Letters: Essays on Typography and Literary
Interpretation, and Popular American Literature.
An American
Bible : A History of the
Good Book in the United States, 1777-1880. By Paul C.
Gutjahr. Format: Paperback, 256pp. ISBN: 0804743398 Publisher:
Stanford University Press January 2001 |
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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