In the course of researching and writing my 2020 book The Ephemeral Eighteenth Century: Print, Sociability and the Cultures of Collecting, I have been encouraged by and learnt from a new ‘ephemera studies’ that has emerged as a sub-field in eighteenth-century and Romantic period studies in the last ten years or so. New work is being produced on collectors of printed ephemera, most notably Sarah Sophia Banks, on ephemera in relation to the codex-form book and literary cultures, and on genres such as the playbill. The development of this interest is closely linked with digitisation that has made collections of ephemera accessible and generally more visible, in databases such as the John Johnson Collection and the British Library playbills project. It has also been influenced by the broader context of the ephemerality of electronic communication in the 21st century, the rapidity and evanescence of messaging and the manageability of the information that we daily absorb and forget. In this paper I’d like to reflect broadly on the category of printed ephemera and the new ‘ephemera studies’ in relation to some key conceptual issues, mainly how we define the category of printed ephemera itself in relation to some influential paradigms in literary and social history. The latter part of the paper will focus on a particular example of printed ephemera of the period – the poster or placard – with reference to radical print culture post 1815, particularly the ‘Radical War’ in Scotland.

Gillian Russell is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York and Director of the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies. She is author of, most recently, The Ephemeral Eighteenth Century: Print, Sociability, and the Cultures of Collecting (CUP, 2020) and has book chapters forthcoming on melodrama and ‘true crime’ in the 1820s, Charles Lamb in the British Museum library, and visual representations of the Regency theatre.

What Can We Do With ‘Ephemera Studies’? - Professor Gillian Russell