Playful Letters: A Study in Early Modern Alphabetics (Impressions: Studies in the Art, Culture, and Future of Books) - Softcover

Boeckeler, Erika Mary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1609384741 ISBN 13: 9781609384746

Verlag: University of Iowa Press, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Alphabetic letters are ubiquitous, multivalent, and largely ignored. Playful Letters reveals their important cultural contributions through Alphabetics—a new interpretive model for understanding artistic production that attends to the signifying interplay of the graphemic, phonemic, lexical, and material capacities of letters. A key period for examining this interplay is the century and a half after the invention of printing, with its unique media ecology of print, manuscript, sound, and image.

Drawing on Shakespeare, anthropomorphic typography, figured letters, and Cyrillic pedagogy and politics, this book explores the ways in which alphabetic thinking and writing inform literature and the visual arts, and it develops reading strategies for the “letterature” that underwrites such cultural production. Playful Letters begins with early modern engagements with the alphabet and the human body—an intersection where letterature emerges with startling force. The linking of letters and typography with bodies produced a new kind of literacy. In turn, educational habits that shaped letter learning and writing permeated the interrelated practices of typography, orthography, and poetry. These mutually informing processes render visible the persistent crumbling of words into letters and their reconstitution into narrative, poetry, and image.

In addition to providing a rich history of literary and artistic alphabetic interrogation in early modern Western Europe and Russia, Playful Letters contributes to the continuous story of how people use new technologies and media to reflect on older forms, including the alphabet itself. 
 

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Erika Mary Boeckeler is an assistant professor of English at Northeastern University. She lives in Melrose, Massachusetts. 

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Iowa Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1609384741
• ISBN 13: 9781609384746
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 285
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar