The Portrait and the Book

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In The Portrait and the Book, Megan Walsh argues that colonial-era author portraits, such as Benjamin Franklin's and Phillis Wheatley's frontispieces, political portraits that circulated during the debates over the Constitution, such as those of the Founders by Charles Willson Peale, and portraits of beloved fictional characters in the 1790s, such as those of Samuel Richardson's heroine Pamela, shaped readers' conceptions of American literature. Through an examination of readers' portrait-collecting habits, writers' employment of ekphrasis, printers' efforts to secure American-made illustrations for periodicals, and engravers' reproductions of British book illustrations, Walsh uncovers in late eighteenth-century America a dynamic but forgotten visual culture that was inextricably tied to the printing industry and to the early US literary imagination.