The Novel and the Blank

Explores American colonial print culture's diverse output and how these texts shaped public life and modernity.

In The Novel and the Blank, Matthew P. Brown uncovers the vibrant, overlooked world of the eighteenth-century British American print shop. Printing more than just novels and pamphlets, these workshops produced a kaleidoscope of printed materials—from legal blanks and almanacs to runaway slave ads and chapbooks—that reflected the complexities of colonial life.

Brown paints a rich cultural history of the time, identifying and describing the steady sellers that stabilized the trade and the print surges ignited by religious revivals of the 1730s-1740s and political upheavals of the revolutionary era. He explores the connections among commercial caution, literary expression, and oppressive structures like the slave trade. The book advances our knowledge of early modern culture in several ways: by providing a rounded portrait of colonial and early national literary culture; by examining a steadily popular canon rarely read by modern scholars; and by depicting the lived religion of readers, writers, and printers who participated in this literary culture.

With a sharp focus on everyday texts and readers—rather than on the canon of works constructed by modern scholars—Brown reimagines the public sphere of the eighteenth century as a vivifying experience. Through an innovative blend of historical rigor and cultural insight, The Novel and the Blank reveals how ordinary print shaped extraordinary shifts in religion, secularism, and the ways we understand modernity itself.