Chapbooks Project - Marc

     There are six students in our digital humanities class who are working as a team and as individuals with the Scottish Chapbooks Collection and Melissa McFee from McLaughlin Library. Chapbooks were small, cheap booklets of eight to twenty four pages with a focus on popular literature. Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they were distributed by merchants and traders from a traveling case or backpack as a source of revenue. Usually they were romances, comedies, or ballads. The post Enlightenment period meant there was an increase of interest in reading. By the twentieth century they had fallen from popular use due to the increase in local newspapers, as well as the popular opinion that they were immoral and tawdry. They also were not very durable and fell apart easily. 

     Each member of the chapbooks group is to pick approximately ten books on a specific, self-chosen topic. All of these member collections are to be analyzed and put together to make a cohesive online exhibition using Omeka. The group will using secondary sources such as academic works and essays, (including the history of "the chapman") and are also considering digital book software. The entire completed project will be presented at the Scottish Colloquium at the University of Toronto. 

     For his individual contribution, Marc has chosen to focus on the subject of romance. As he says, romanticism was a large part of eighteenth and nineteenth century literature due to the Enlightenment. It evolved from the medieval classical style and reached for the more general population. Mark will be studying how romance and romanticism was depicted in the time of chapbooks. He will also be comparing this to the perspective of what what was going on in society at the time.