Printing for Manuscript

The concept of “manuscript” is a back formation, dependent upon the prior concept of printing. This course uses the Beinecke’s collections to explore how, from Gutenberg to the signatures on credit cards, printing has revolutionized writing by hand. We then turn to the problem of the belated fetishizing of literary manuscripts. For it was only in the eighteenth century that significant numbers of these manuscripts began to be collected. To what extent did the literary archives that began to preserve these manuscripts transform authorship and the very concept of “literature”? And how does printing stimulate our desire for the manuscript traces of the hands of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson—and of earlier writers like Shakespeare?