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Abstract
This study illuminates the ways in which the short-lived, transitory objects and materials of everyday life were gathered, processed and reconstituted into the fabric of social and intellectual life by recasting "the culture of ephemera" within the contexts of historical poetics, women's history, historical linguistics, literacy studies, and material culture. Poetry, fiction, recipes, emblems, and obituaries were clipped, preserved, and assembled, creating a richly textured historical and cultural fabric. This assemblage of language, textiles, imagery, or dried flowers conveyed important cultural meaning and was preserved in a variety of forms or genres. Commonplace books, friendship albums, scrapbooks, and amateur artists' portfolios all contained similar information and materials but the various genres gave shape to diverse patterns of reading, writing and social interaction.
I examine a wide array of literary artifacts and cultural texts, including commonplace books, scrapbooks, friendship albums, amateur artists' portfolios, letters, diaries, newsprint poetry, journalism, and daily rhetoric themes, in an attempt to reconceptualize reading, writing, canon formation and cultural literacy. My goal is to illuminate the ways in which ordinary people utilized common materials--blank books, pen and ink, wax, paste, paper and fabric scraps of all kinds--to process information about their world and their own historical presence and reality.
Throwing out a fishing line, giving form to a fluid medium, or selecting the actors for a play--"casting" is a particularly appropriate metaphor for the interpretation of culture. "Recasting" the culture of ephemera therefore signifies a revisionary process of socio-historical literary interpretation. Recasting the culture of ephemera within the contexts of historical poetics, women's history, historical linguistics, literacy studies, and material culture, I hope to illuminate the ways in which the short-lived, transitory objects and materials of every-day life were gathered, processed and reconstituted into meaningful expressions of selfhood and history.
