Paula McDowell

Professor of English

Education

Ph.D. (English) Stanford University, 1991
B.A. (Honors English) University of British Columbia, Canada, 1982

Areas of Research/Interest

Eighteenth-century British studies; media history and theory; History of the Book

 

Fellowships/Honors

John Ben Snow Foundation Prize for Invention of the Oral; Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award for The Women of Grub Street; National Humanities Center Fellowship; American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship; American Philosophical Society Research Grant; National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the Newberry Library; American Bibliographical Society Research Fellowship; United Kingdom Bibliographical Society Research Grant

Bio

Paula McDowell specializes in eighteenth-century British studies, media history and theory, and the History of the Book. Her most recent book, The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 2017), won the John Ben Snow Foundation Prize, awarded annually by the North American Conference on British Studies for the best book by a North American scholar on any aspect of British Studies from the middle ages to the eighteenth century. It examines the oral/literate binary as a heuristic — a tool for understanding that itself has a history — and argues that the concept of "oral culture" was in fact a back formation of the explosion of print commerce. With the support of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, the National Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, she has published The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678-1730 (Oxford, 1998), Elinor James: Printed Writings (Ashgate, 2005), and articles on subjects ranging from the epistemology of ephemera to models of the Enlightenment.
She is currently working on another archivally-based book, on the life, career, and reading and writing practices of the Canadian professor, scholar, and media theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980).

Publications

  • The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain
    University of Chicago Press. 2017
  • The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works Series II Printed Writings, 1641–1700: Part 3 Volume 11 Elinor James
    Ashgate. 2005
    Book jacket
  • The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace 1678-1730
    Clarendon Press. 1998
  • "Defoe's Essay Upon Literature and Eighteenth-Century Histories of Mediation," Publications of the Modern Language Association 130: 3 (May 2015), 63-84
  • "Ong and the Concept of Orality," Religion and Literature 44.3 (Autumn 2012), for Ong Centennary Forum: "The Legacy of Walter J. Ong," guest ed. Sara van den Berg, Director, Walter J. Ong Center for Language and Media (Nov. 2012)
  • "Of Grubs and Other Insects: Constructing the Categories of 'Ephemera' and 'Literature' in Eighteenth-Century British Writing," Book History 15 (2012), 48-70
  • Rpt. in Kevin Murphy and Sally O'Driscoll, eds., Studies in Ephemera: Text and Image in Eighteenth-Century Print (Bucknell University Press, Nov. 2012)
  • "Travel," in Jack Lynch, ed., Samuel Johnson in Context (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2011), 375-84
  • "Narrative or Network?: Eighteenth-Century Feminist Literary History at the Crossroads," Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 29: 1 (2010), 137-58
  • "Toward a Genealogy of 'Print Culture' and 'Oral Tradition,'" in Clifford Siskin and William Warner, eds., This Is Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2010), 229-46
  • Rpt. in Michelle Levy and Tom Mole, eds., The Broadview Reader in Book History (Broadview Press, 2014), 395-416
  • "'The Art of Printing Was Fatal': Print Commerce and the Idea of Oral Tradition in Eighteenth-Century Ballad Discourse," in Patricia Fumerton and Anita Guerrini, eds., with the assistance of Kris McAbee, Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500-1800 (Ashgate Press, 2010), 35-56
  • "'On the Behalf of the Printers': A Late Stuart Printer-Author and Her Causes," in Sabrina Baron, Eric Lindquist, and Eleanor Shevlin, eds., Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies After Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 125-39
  • "Oral Religio-Political Activism and Textual Production," ch. 3 of The Women of Grub Street, rpt. in David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, eds., The Book History Reader (Routledge, 2nd edn. 2007), 292-307
  • "'The Manufacture and Lingua-facture of Ballad-Making': Broadside Ballads in Long Eighteenth-Century Ballad Discourse," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 47: 2-3 (Summer/Fall 2006), 149-76
  • “Defoe and the Contagion of the Oral: Modeling Media Shift in A Journal of the Plague Year,” Publications of the Modern Language Association121:1 (Jan. 2006), 87-106. Special Issue: "Book History and the Idea of Literature," ed. Seth Lerer and Leah Price
  • "Why Fanny Can't Read: Joseph Andrews and the (Ir)relevance of Literacy," in Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia, eds., The Blackwell Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Blackwell, 2005), 167-90
  • "Enlightenment Enthusiasms and the Spectacular Failure of the Philadelphian Society," Eighteenth-Century Studies 35.4 (Summer 2002), 515-33
  • "Women and the Business of Print," in Vivien Jones, ed., Women and Literature, 1700-1800 (Cambridge, 1999), 200-30
  • "Narrative Authority, Critical Complicity: The Case of Jonathan Wild," Studies in the Novel 30.2 (Summer 1998), 211-31
  • "Tace Sowle, Quaker Publisher," in James K. Bracken and Joel Silver, eds., The British Literary Book Trade, 1475-1700 (Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1996), 249-57
  • "Consuming Women: The Life of the 'Literary Lady' as Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century England," Genre 26 (Summer/Fall 1993), 219-52