On March 13, 1711, an article appeared in "The Spectator" about Thomas Inkle, a young and aspiring English trader cast ashore in the Americas, who is saved from violent death by Yarico, a beautiful Indian maiden. When he and Yarico become lovers, Inkle promises to clothe her in silks and transport her in carriages when he returns with her to England. Some months later, they are picked up after Yarico succeeds in signaling a passing English ship. But upon reaching Barbados, Inkle immediately sells Yarico into slavery--raising the price he demands when he learns that Yarico is pregnant with his child.

Based on a real life account in Richard Ligon's "History of Barbados" published half a century earlier, the "Spectator" story caused a sensation as debate intensified over slavery in the British colonies--and it would be told and retold for decades as perhaps the most compelling "folk epic" of its age. In "English Trader, Indian Maid," Frank Felsenstein has assembled the main English versions of this once-famous story, including a newly rediscovered poetical epistle by Charles James Fox, one of the leading parliamentary promoters of the cause of abolition. As well as George Colman the Younger's still vibrant comic opera--considered by some the earliest English social problem play--the book contains tantalizing retellings from the Caribbean and from America, where the story has close affinities with the tale of Pocahontas.

Also present are notable works by English women writers, such as Frances Seymour and Anna Maria Porter, and freshly attributed English renditions by Stephen Duck, the Wiltshire "thresher poet," and by "Peter Pindar" (John Wolcot). Felsenstein also suggests an intriguing link with William Wordsworth, who may have had the story in mind while composing his "Lyrical Ballads." This edition restores the story of Inkle and Yarico to its rightful place as a focal narrative in cultural and historical debate of issues of gender, race, and colonialism.

"In Inkle and Yarico we have that rare entity, a perfect example of an intertextual discourse that reflects so much of the diversity and contradictions of the age that fostered it... Its diverse handling of issues of gender and race makes it a lively and highly topical discussion piece in the classroom. Equally, given the regrettable (and actually surprising) shortfall of prominent eighteenth-century literary texts that treat of the subject of slavery, Inkle and Yarico fills a highly significant gap."--from the Introduction p.43]

The discovery of a large cache of circulation records from the Muncie, Indiana, Public Library in 2003 offers unprecedented detail about American reading behavior at the turn of the twentieth century. Frank Felsenstein and James J. Connolly have mined these records to produce an in-depth account of print culture in Muncie, the city featured in the famed "Middletown" studies conducted by Robert and Helen Lynd almost a century ago. Using the data assembled and made public through the What Middletown Read Database (www.bsu.edu/libraries/wmr), a celebrated new resource the authors helped launch, Felsenstein and Connolly analyze the borrowing choices and reading culture of social groups and individuals. What Middletown Read is much more than a statistical study. Felsenstein and Connolly dig into diaries, meeting minutes, newspaper reports, and local histories to trace the library's development in relation to the city's cosmopolitan aspirations, to profile individual readers, and to explore such topics as the relationship between children's reading and their schooling and what books were discussed by local women's clubs. The authors situate borrowing patterns and reading behaviour within the contexts of a rapidly growing, culturally ambitious small city, an evolving public library, an expanding market for print, and the broad social changes that accompanied industrialization in the United States. The result is a rich, revealing portrait of the place of reading in an emblematic American community.

Bringing together leading scholars of literature, history, library studies, and communications, Print Culture Histories Beyond the Metropolis rejects the idea that print culture necessarily spreads outwards from capitals and cosmopolitan cities and focuses attention to how the residents of smaller cities, provincial districts, rural settings, and colonial outposts have produced, disseminated, and read print materials. Too often print media has been represented as an engine of metropolitan modernity. Rather than being the passive recipients of print culture generated in city centres, the inhabitants of provinces and colonies have acted independently, as jobbing printers in provincial Britain, black newspaper proprietors in the West Indies, and library patrons in "Middletown," Indiana, to mention a few examples. This important new book gives us a sophisticated account of how printed materials circulated, a more precise sense of their impact, and a fuller of understanding of how local contexts shaped reading experiences.

Tobias Smollett travelled through Europe with his wife in 1763-65 in a journey designed to recover his mental and physical health after the death of their daughter. The resulting travel narrative provoked controversy and anger in the eighteenth century, when it was often negatively compared to Laurence Sterne's fictional European travels in A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. Unlike Sterne's sensitive hero, Smollett is argumentative, acerbic, and often contemptuous of local customs. In addition to a critical introduction, this edition provides extensive annotation and appendices with material on Smollett's correspondence, the book's reception in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, related travel writing, and Smollett's infamous satirization as "Smelfungus" in Sterne's A Sentimental Journey.

A scholarly edition of a work by Tobias Smollett. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.