Elizabeth Carolyn Miller F'09

Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowships 2009
Assistant Professor
Department: English
University of California, Davis
The Birth of Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Print Culture, 1880-1914

The final decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a flood of print production aimed at mass audiences, but also a corresponding surge in small-scale radical periodicals and politically oriented experiments in “slow print.” “Slow print” is print that actively opposed mass-production; it was often explicitly political in objective, as socialist, anarchist, and other radical groups came to believe that large-scale, mass-oriented print was no way to bring about social change. Focusing on under-studied periodicals and literary venues, this study investigates radical British literature from 1880-1914, a historical moment when many writers became less inclined to see plentiful, cheap print as a progressive force, and more inclined to see it as an effect of unrestrained capitalism.