Book by David Buchanan
In Acts of Modernity, David Buchanan reads nineteenth-century historical novels from Scotland, Am... more In Acts of Modernity, David Buchanan reads nineteenth-century historical novels from Scotland, America, France, and Canada as instances of modern discourse reflective of community concerns and methods that were transatlantic in scope. Following on revolutionary events at home and abroad, the unique combination of history and romance initiated by Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814) furthered interest in the transition to and depiction of the nation-state. Established and lesser-known novelists reinterpreted the genre to describe the impact of modernization and to propose coping mechanisms, according to interests and circumstances. Besides analysis of the chronotopic representation of modernity within and between national contexts, Buchanan considers how remediation enabled diverse communities to encounter popular historical novels in upmarket and downmarket forms over the course of the century. He pays attention to the way communication practices are embedded within and constitutive of the social lives of readers, and more specifically, to how cultural producers adapted the historical novel to dynamic communication situations. In these ways, Acts of Modernity investigates how the historical novel was repeatedly reinvented to effectively communicate the consequences of modernity as problem-solutions of relevance to people on both sides of the Atlantic.
Online Resources by David Buchanan
Popular Print Edmonton is a collaborative research project located in the Department of English a... more Popular Print Edmonton is a collaborative research project located in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. The work involves undergraduate, graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty researchers in the investigation of print and reading in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada from 2013 to 2018. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Red Flags: The Early Labour Press in Canada is an open access online resource on the early labour... more Red Flags: The Early Labour Press in Canada is an open access online resource on the early labour press in Canada. It includes an introduction to the site and subject, descriptions of select newspapers, and additional resources to further knowledge of the subject, including chronologies of labour history and the early labour press, suggestions for further reading, a list of web links, and a sample syllabus. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Popular Romanticism is an open access website providing students, teachers, and scholars of Roman... more Popular Romanticism is an open access website providing students, teachers, and scholars of Romanticism, popular literature, print history, and nineteenth-century Britain with a resource for the study of print and reading in the Romantic period.
Inquire is a peer-reviewed, open-access online journal of Comparative Literature created by gradu... more Inquire is a peer-reviewed, open-access online journal of Comparative Literature created by graduate students in the Comparative Literature Program at the University of Alberta.
Streetprint Bratislava presents and describes a variety of print artifacts that people were buyin... more Streetprint Bratislava presents and describes a variety of print artifacts that people were buying and reading in Bratislava, Slovakia during the summer of 2009. These artifacts cover a range of categories, from news to romance, periodicals to novels, in a variety of languages including Slovak, Czech, Hungarian, German, and English. The site enables readers, students, teachers, and researchers interested in contemporary popular print, European or Slovak print culture, and the history of literature, publishing, and reading more generally, to search an extensive archive. The narrative section describes aspects of the production and reception of these artifacts using images of the artifacts, photography of the city and points of sale, interviews with publishers, sellers, authors, and readers, as well as in-the-field observation.
Articles and Book Chapters by David Buchanan
Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, 2023
This article describes the uses of literature in The Labor Advocate: A Weekly Labor Reform Newspa... more This article describes the uses of literature in The Labor Advocate: A Weekly Labor Reform Newspaper (Toronto, 1890-91). As editor of the Advocate, Thomas Phillips Thompson aimed to increase awareness of the means and consequences of industrial capitalism, and thus enhance the possibility of social justice for the working class. He did so in a mixed format periodical that included poetry, short fiction, and serialized novels as well as editorials, biographies, obituaries, reports, letters, and columns. Over forty-four issues, Thompson experimented with literary expression to attract readers and foster the democratic reform of social organization. Analysis of the Advocate points to the importance of communication strategies in both the early history of the Canadian labour press and the longer history of labour in transnational contexts.
Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780-1840, 2017
English Studies in Canada
This article describes and analyses one of the most influential socialist newspapers of the early... more This article describes and analyses one of the most influential socialist newspapers of the early-twentieth century in Canada, the Western Clarion (Vancouver, 1903-25). Emphasis is placed on the selective use of various literary forms to define community interests and popularize the platform of the Socialist Party of Canada, and on how such communication practices shaped and were shaped by the maintenance of identity and group formation. At stake is a more complete record of Canadian literary history as well as a better understanding of literature and the politics of progress during a critical period of nation building.
Journal of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society, 2015
Walter Scott’s historical novels were written for the middle-class, but downmarket readers were n... more Walter Scott’s historical novels were written for the middle-class, but downmarket readers were no less interested in popular new novels. New forms of the chapbook made upmarket novels available to a spectrum of readers who could not afford to buy the latest novels or rent them from a circulating library. This essay shows that even at the lowest prices, chapbook versions of the Waverley novels varied considerably. Ultimately, I argue that description of the social production of chapbooks should be the basis of a revaluation of chapbook reading in terms of community interests. The essay concludes with a practical consideration of how critical multimedia histories of reading might change classroom encounters with canonical novels such as Waverley and Ivanhoe.
Topodynamics of Arrival. Essays on Self and Pilgrimage, 2012
This chapter describes the topography of arrival in a literary work as de-termined by the coordin... more This chapter describes the topography of arrival in a literary work as de-termined by the coordination of time and space. Following upon a brief account of the existential meeting of Self and Other in The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. seventh century BCE), an exploration of the chronotopic changes in romance from Xenophon of Ephesus’s An Ephesian Tale (c. second century CE) to Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian (1818) as outlined by Mikhail Bakhtin demonstrates how synchronic influences lead to significant diachronic changes in an otherwise consistent literary form. Then, a reading of Anton Chekhov’s Lady with the Dog (1899) shows how variations in social space effectively reconstruct the topography of arrival. The result is a historical map of literary works that com-plicates the reading of difference in existential terms by illustrating the chronotopic manipulation that frames arrival.
European Romantic Review, 2011
The downmarket dissemination of the Waverley Novels in nineteenth-century Britain is usually cons... more The downmarket dissemination of the Waverley Novels in nineteenth-century Britain is usually considered in terms of collected editions, but adaptations for print and stage played an important role in placing the fictional works of Walter Scott at the centre of contemporary social tensions. There were thousands of performances in various forms at patent and non-patent venues throughout Britain for nearly every work of fiction. Melodramatic versions of The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818) in London, for the Royal Theatres Covent Garden and Drury Lane as well as minor theatres south of the Thames such as the Surrey, provide the basis for a case study that describes the participation of venue, performance, and audience in successful production and reception. The involvement of commerce and politics, print and theatre, upmarket and working-class audiences indicates the importance of Scott dramatized in the study of the Waverley Novels, Romanticism, popular culture, and national identity and group formation in the nineteenth century.
Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net (RAVON)
Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels provide an excellent means of illustrating the multifaceted print ... more Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels provide an excellent means of illustrating the multifaceted print market in nineteenth-century Britain. Not only was each novel an upmarket best-seller, but pirated copies, stage adaptations, abridgements, and collected editions transformed each story for readers across class and socio-economic differences. There was also considerable market differentiation within each of these forms. For example, the traditional chapbook, featuring tales such as Guy of Warwick and Robin Hood, was altered by publishers adapting both out-of-copyright and current novels for various audiences. The form, content, price, and length of these new chapbooks were designed to attract and develop different parts of a broad downmarket readership. Accordingly, this case study of Scott’s The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818) as chapbook from 1818 to ca. 1830 describes the transformation of an upmarket novel for a popular print form influenced by publishers, readers, and socio-historical circumstances.
New Word Order: Transnational Themes in Book History, 2011
Walter Scott is sometimes the invisible elephant in the room as regards contemporary studies in R... more Walter Scott is sometimes the invisible elephant in the room as regards contemporary studies in Romanticism or Victorianism, but his long narrative poems and historical novels were critically acclaimed and popularly received—printed, pirated, and transformed—on an unprecedented scale in Europe and America throughout the nineteenth century. As such, Scott provides an excellent means of investigating how literary works are produced and received within and across national borders. This paper identifies national and develops transnational approaches to book history by considering thematic, formal, and material means of transmission relevant to the participation of the Waverley Novel in modern self-identity and group formation, with particular emphasis on The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818).
Studies in the Humanities, 2011
In this article The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001; dir. Joel Coen) is considered as an intertextual ... more In this article The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001; dir. Joel Coen) is considered as an intertextual investigation of the conditions underlying self-identity in the modern world. The problematic transition from traditional to modern forms of living is explored through the representation of reflexivity and uncertainty in daily life. The extreme circulation of a capitalist economy and perpetual self-reflection supported by the profusion of mass media that provide opportunities for profit and expression also de-center the modern subject. The struggle to find a place in this changing world is associated with the trauma of displacement and loss, dysfunctional relationships, and exploitation that can lead to murder and suicide. The fundamental questions involved are directly relevant and applicable to a contemporary understanding of agency and structure, individuality and community, self and Other: What can we say to each other? What do we know? Who am I?
Reviews, Review Essays, and Entries by David Buchanan
Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, 2023
Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, 2022
Reviewed by DAVID BUCHANAN Athabasca University Troy J. Bassett's book reconsiders a staple of ni... more Reviewed by DAVID BUCHANAN Athabasca University Troy J. Bassett's book reconsiders a staple of nineteenth-century fiction, the three-volume novel, as a literary and economic product. Following Bassett's review of scholarly work in the first chapter, the second, titled "The Production of Multi-Volume Fiction, 1837-1898," offers a bibliometric overview of novel production before turning to the industry's underlying economics, from the perspectives of both publishers and libraries. The chapter includes lengthy tables and figures, as well as detailed statistical summaries of the three-volume novels listed on Bassett's own online database: At the Circulating Library: A Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837-1901 (2007-present). This summary of extensive quantitative research provides a multifaceted view of the Victorian novel-including attention to format (i.e., number of volumes), authorship, genre, nationality, and genderwhich receives further attention later in the book and sets up the case studies that follow. Chapter 3, "The Experience of Richard Bentley and Son," examines the publishing accounts of more than a hundred three-volume novels published by Bentley between 1865 and 1890, to assess the costs of production and financial viability of the three-volume novel for Victorian publishers. This case study is notable for its insights into the relationships between publishers, authors, and libraries, and
Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1660-1820
Entry on the anonymous historical novel, Memoirs of Oliver Cromwell and His Children. Supposed to... more Entry on the anonymous historical novel, Memoirs of Oliver Cromwell and His Children. Supposed to be Written By Himself (1816).
Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, 2018
Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2017
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Book by David Buchanan
Online Resources by David Buchanan
Articles and Book Chapters by David Buchanan
Reviews, Review Essays, and Entries by David Buchanan