Bumfodder: Cheap Paper, Ephemeral Print, and the Unsettled Nation, 1651-1720

Abstract

This dissertation argues that the material qualities of paper had a direct and significant impact on the development of English and Dutch national identities through the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Affordable, accessible texts played a critical role in disseminating concepts of nationhood among early modern elites and non-elites alike. Cheap publications, however, required cheap paper. Unlike the creamy white sheets of high-end paper destined for magisterial tomes, cheap paper was brown, thin, and ephemeral. The disposability of affordable paper necessarily colored the reception of the text printed upon it, and shaped the ways readers made sense of emerging nationalized structures. Each chapter of this project examines a different category of affordable print, their tactics for molding a sense of national cohesion, and the ways the materiality of the paper they are printed on complicated their intended message. Chapter one looks at how the ephemerality of political broadsides and pamphlets allowed readers to revise personal attitudes regarding international antagonism during the first two Anglo-Dutch wars. The second chapter analyzes almanacs and how the conditions of their production produced locally flavored iterations of national identities. Chapter three examines the way in which abundant paper fostered the emergence of travel writing as popular literature and how parodies of the genre challenged common assumptions of national belonging. The final chapter zeros in on one book, Het Groote Tafereel der Dwaasheid, and the ways its graphic satires use paper’s physical lightness, to explain and critique the financial collapse of 1720.