English Language and Literature Commons^™

Surface Reading Paper As Feminist Bibliography, Georgina Wilson

Criticism

This article models a mode of feminist bibliography by “surface reading” paper. Taking Ben Jonson’s Sejanus His Fall (1605) as a case study, this article reads watermarks as reminders of paper’s three-dimensional materiality, whose surfaces and depths model the more and less legible forms of labor which contribute to paper’s making. Watermarks here become a creative and critical prompt to recover the interventions of John Spilman (the papermaker whose output was used for Sejanus), Spilman’s workers, and especially his female ragpickers. This article fuses close reading of literary texts and archival sources with bibliography and theory to demonstrate fresh …