Georgina Wilson's "Paper and the Making of Early Modern Literature"

Georgina Wilson is an early modern literary scholar specialising in material texts. Her work has been published in Criticism, The Oxford Handbook of the History of the Book in Early Modern England, and Inscription: the Journal of Material Text – Theory, Practice, History. She writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement.

Wilson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Paper and the Making of Early Modern Literature, and shared the following:

Opening Paper and the Making of Early Modern Literature at page 99 puts us near the beginning of chapter 3 of 4. We’re over half way through the book (excluding endnotes), which suddenly makes it seem shorter than it had felt to write. Taking part in a pattern of short, punchy chapter titles, chapter 3 is entitled ‘Form’; it’s about the history of formalism and the role of paper (as an imaginative and material form) in that history. Two of the three paragraphs are broader brush – the kind of ‘history-of-the-discipline’ stuff that might be useful for readers looking to situate themselves within the longue durée of material texts – while the third paragraph dives into a close reading of the early modern theologian William Pemble.

That swooping between the bigger picture and granular close reading is representative of the book as a whole, and the critics cited on this page (D.F. McKenzie, Peter Stallybrass, Margreta De Grazia, Allison Deutermann and András Kiséry span multiple generations of scholarship in a way which, I hope, also reflects something about the book. At the same time page 99 is broadly about book history rather than paper and so prises open the focus of the argument. The particular affordances of paper and form only start to emerge from William Pemble’s similies about souls and whiteness which are abruptly truncated by the edge of the page.

Having just taught an MSt class in which we discussed the units of pages, leaves, and sheets in relation to early modern books, I couldn’t help wondering what page 99 would mean in some of these different configurations. The real 99th page in this book, accounting for title pages and preliminary material, is numbered page 91, and comes at the end of possibly my favourite chapter on ‘composition’. This chapter is about the gathering together of stray sheets and paper fragments into books as a model for gathering words into sentences, and I enjoyed thinking about my own writing as I put the argument together. If Paper and the Making of Early Modern Literature were a quarto – printed from sheets of paper folded twice to make 8 pages per sheet - then page 99 would fall on the 13th sheet, printed at the same time as pages 98, 102, and 103. Imagining this book as an octavo or a duodecimo would place page 99 in relationship to a plethora other pages. So to really do justice to the potential of early modern paper we couldn’t talk about page 99 without talking about all those other pages as well, and eventually we’d have to abandon the idea of the single page and go back to the unit of the book.

Learn more about Paper and the Making of Early Modern Literature at the University of Pennsylvania Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erin Pearson's "Grievous Entanglement"

Erin Pearson is Associate Professor of English at Elon University.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Grievous Entanglement: Consumption, Connection, and Slavery in the Atlantic World, with the following results:

As the pivot point between the two sections of Grievous Entanglement, the single paragraph on page 99 aptly introduces the book’s major concerns. It reminds readers that consumption-as-connection, the focus of the book, existed because meanings of the word “consume” shifted in the eighteenth century to include the economic sense of buying as well as older, largely negative senses like “eat” and “destroy.” The book as a whole argues that this semantic shift unlocked new ways for people far away from slavery to envision their own connection to (and complicity in) slavery. Consumption-as-connection revealed how everyday purchases drove a system designed to make human beings (economically) consumable. As page 99 notes, the first section of the book explores how this conceptual framework enabled people to understand commodities like sugar and tobacco as direct links to the enslaved laborers who had produced them. The rest of page 99 introduces the book’s second section, which moves from depictions of actual commodities to the metaphors of violent eating that permeated the discourse on slavery. Commentators repeatedly used metaphors of cannibalism or ravenous animals to capture the depredations of chattel slavery as well as its economic logic.

While page 99 offers an overview of the structure and argument of Grievous Entanglement, it does not give a sense of how that argument is developed. Grievous Entanglement investigates a conceptual framework adopted by a wide range of people throughout the Atlantic world. In order to show the pervasiveness of this thought pattern, the book carefully analyzes small details in a variety of texts, including poems, paintings, songs, political cartoons, novels, and antislavery pamphlets. A reader might thus get a better idea of the work by turning to a page that analyzes how Harriet Jacobs deploys animal imagery to denounce enslaver appetites or how Samuel Taylor Coleridge uses cannibalism metaphors to critique consumers’ failure to recognize the source of their luxuries. One chapter considers not only the lyrics of a blackface minstrel song, but the significance of the material form of the book in which it was printed; another traces how narratives by formerly enslaved abolitionists who resisted hungry animals influenced academic painting on both sides of the Atlantic. These cultural close readings illuminate historical conceptions of slavery, and that, ultimately, is the heart of the book.

Learn more about Grievous Entanglement at the University of Virginia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrea Horbinski's "Manga's First Century"

Andrea Horbinski began studying Japanese in college after she started watching anime in high school, and went on to research hypernationalist manga in Kyoto on a Fulbright Fellowship. While pursuing her PhD in history and new media at the University of California, Berkeley, she harnessed her love of manga and pop culture, writing a general history of manga in its historical and global contexts for her dissertation. Along the way, she uncovered the role that fans of manga have played in the medium’s development since its earliest decades, mirroring her own experience in sci-fi and online fandoms since childhood.

Her new book, Manga’s First Century: How Creators and Fans Made Japanese Comics, 1905-1989, is the result of ten years spent researching, reading, and thinking about manga on three continents, including research stints in Belgium and Japan.

Horbinski applied the “Page 99 Test” to Manga’s First Century and reported the following:

Page 99 of Manga’s First Century takes readers to the 1930s, discussing the ideals and leading figures of the Shinmangaha Shūdan (New Manga Faction Group). The group rose to prominence in this decade by expanding manga for adults to new publication venues under the slogan “market acquisition” (shijō no kakutoku), and sought to avoid political content in their manga—a wise move amongst the escalating censorship of wartime Japan. Although they were quite well-paid for professionals at the time, two of the group’s leading figures, Kondō Hidezō and Sugiura Yukio, apparently saw the Shinmangaha and its activities as complementary to their interest in anarchism. The remainder of the page briefly discusses the nature of anarchism in imperial Japan, and how it was easily twisted to serve the wartime state.

In one sense, this page literally lives up to Manga’s First Century’s subtitle of “creators and fans,” as the Shinmangaha members were upstart young creators seeking to expand manga’s ambit beyond what the establishment thought was wise—a recurring phenomenon in my discussion of manga’s history in the 20thC. And insasmuch as I sought to explain how manga became manga, it is representative of that aspect of the book too; although the Shinmangaha and its creators are not well-known outside Japan (and are somewhat forgotten nowadays there too), they played a key role in manga in the 1930s and 1940s, and themselves became the manga establishment in the 1950s. Bringing otherwise obscure creators and developments in manga to light, and explaining how they fit together and led to the manga that people around the world love today, is the book’s project.

At the same time, this isn’t the page I would necessarily pick to sell readers on the book, even if it does reflect significant aspects of the whole. The Shinmangaha’s leading members achieved a kind of soft landing and were co-opted into the so-called New Order by the end of the 1930s; Kondō Hidezō became the central figure at Manga (1940-45), the state-approved manga magazine that was one of the few outlets in which publishing manga was permissible after 1940. Their experience was thus atypical of manga on the whole, which was censored nearly out of existence as many creators were drafted, blacklisted, or simply driven out of the profession in these years. In this straitened era, manga fans kept manga alive by avidly rereading older manga, either from each other’s personal collections or through used and rental bookstores—which laid down consumption patterns that exploded into new modes of manga entirely after the war. As one excerpt from a largely chronological account, page 99 is only a snapshot; there’s far more to manga history in the book than this one page contains, and readers will learn a lot more about many other people and developments in that history by picking up the book.

Visit Andrea Horbinski's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan A. Stapley's "Holiness to the Lord"

Jonathan A. Stapley is an award-winning historian and scientist. He received his Ph.D. from Purdue University and has been active in the field of Mormon History for two decades.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Holiness to the Lord: Latter-day Saint Temple Worship, and shared the following:

In a famous line from “I Believe,” one of the catchiest songs from The Book of Mormon musical, Elder Price declares, “that God has a plan for all of us. I believe that plan involves me getting my own planet.” It’s funny. It is also a flawed caricature that largely does not map onto the beliefs of individual members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (more commonly called “Mormons”).

Latter-day Saints are constructing temples throughout the world. They excitedly take the public on tours of these iconic buildings once they are complete. But after the prayers of dedication, the public is excluded and church members make promises not to talk about what happens inside. The result is often awkward. Holiness to the Lord: Latter-day Saint Temple Worship is a detailed explanation of the religious ceremonies that occur within these temples, their history over the last nearly 200 years, and an exploration of their religious meaning in the lives of church members. There is a bit of ritual theory and religious studies, but it is mostly history.

Page 99 notes how “it can be tempting to focus on the exotic beliefs” of nineteenth century Mormons. I write this after describing in vivid detail the religious cosmologies of Brigham Young—the leader of the church from 1844 to 1877—and perhaps his most prominent wife, Eliza Snow. Their beliefs about the afterlife and eternal destination of the human soul are the seeds for Elder Price’s goofy Broadway declaration. Page 99 deals with perhaps the most “exotic” elements of Latter-day Saint history. These beliefs are largely irrelevant to the lived religion and beliefs of the millions of practicing Mormons who worship in temples today. But they are also necessary to understand the trajectory of those beliefs and practices.

Page 99 fails at being representative of Holiness to the Lord as a whole. But it is still key for the book to represent the history of the Latter-day Saint temple as a whole.

Visit Jonathan A. Stapley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Derek Edyvane's "The Politics of Politeness"

Derek Edyvane is Professor of Political Theory in the School of Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds. He was previously a lecturer and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of York where he earned his PhD. He works on incivility, injustice, citizenship, and the ethics of political resistance and is the author of two books: Community and Conflict (2007) and Civic Virtue and the Sovereignty of Evil (2012). He was awarded the Political Studies Harrison Prize for his article 'Incivility as Dissent' (2020).

Edyvane applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Politics of Politeness: Citizenship, Civility, and the Democracy of Everyday Life, with the following results:

Politeness is often imagined as a stuffy affair of rigid conformity to social rules and conventions. But when we look more closely at how politeness actually works on the ground of everyday living, a much more interesting picture emerges.

Page 99 of The Politics of Politeness, which falls almost exactly halfway through the book and somewhere in the middle of Chapter 4, explores what happens when the usual norms of politeness are unclear or contested. In moments like these, politeness doesn’t retreat - it gets creative.

Taking the example of a shop-keeper who code-switches his manner depending on the customer, page 99 contends that this isn’t just savvy customer service, but rather a kind of social improvisation. In many everyday settings, politeness actually consists in the wisdom to depart from rigid etiquette and to adapt. It’s about crafting interactions that honour a deeper ‘civilizational’ ideal: the will to live decently alongside other people.

In this way, page 99 informs the reader of one of the book’s central ideas: its sense of the ritual-like nature of politeness and the suppleness of the ritual in the face of urban superdiversity. It also captures the book’s insistence on the embeddedness of the politeness ritual in a larger (and more controversial) civilizational bedrock.

Still, the Page 99 Test is not wholly satisfactory as a browser’s shortcut. It doesn’t quite capture the book’s core claim: that politeness is political. The book argues that the way we navigate politeness in daily life has real consequences for the health and vitality of democracy. And it argues that we can therefore use political theory to help us better understand the dilemmas of everyday civility.

That said, page 99 does offer at least a clue. After all, politics is often the art of negotiating difference and diversity. And what is politeness, if not a quiet, everyday way of doing just that?

Learn more about The Politics of Politeness at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Maxim Samson's "Earth Shapers"

Maxim Samson is a geographer and the author of Invisible Lines: Boundaries and Belts That Define the World. An award-winning educator and researcher, he has taught and presented keynote lectures at universities in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Indonesia. In addition to working as an adjunct professor at DePaul University in Chicago, he is the immediate past chair of the American Association of Geographers’ Religions and Belief Systems research specialty group and serves as associate editor of the Journal of Jewish Education. In his free time, he enjoys long-distance running and exploring the culture and language of his favorite country, Indonesia.

Samson applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Earth Shapers: How We Mapped and Mastered the World, from the Panama Canal to the Baltic Way, and reported the following:

Page 99 brings readers about three quarters of the way through the third chapter, which examines how people have molded and remolded the planet to make travel more convenient. Specifically, the chapter draws attention to the somewhat controversial development and administration of the Panama Canal; the excerpt quoted below covers one of the final episodes before the USA handed over control to Panama:

And so, when insistent words and the withdrawal of economic and military aid failed to pressure Noriega to stand down, in late 1989 the United States opted to initiate its last assertive hurrah in Panama. Contending that democracy, US citizens’ lives in Panama and the very integrity of the Torrijos–Carter Treaties were all threatened by a military dictator who had turned the country into a loathsome hub of drug trafficking, President George H. W. Bush’s forces succeeded in chasing down and ousting a former ally in a matter of weeks, via a highly unorthodox method. Having learned that this notorious drug smuggler with a penchant for prostitutes was hiding out in the unlikely confines of the Holy See’s diplomatic offices in Panama City, the Americans’ successful strategy involved blaring out a playlist of rock anthems with a common theme: ‘Manuel, your days in charge are numbered’. Though many international observers were outraged by what they viewed as a flagrant violation of Panama’s sovereignty and international law – the invasion, that is, not the refrains of ‘No More Mister Nice Guy’ by Alice Cooper or ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’ by Bon Jovi – and the United Nations General Assembly condemned the invasion by a vote of seventy-five to twenty, few in Panama seemed to care. Finally, Americans and Panamanians appeared to be on the same page, assured that with the strongman out of the picture, the connective infrastructure the United States had built and managed according to its own interests could now work to Panama’s benefit as well.

This excerpt offers readers only fragments of Earth Shapers’ central theme—how through our fashioning of geographical connections, humans have guided the course of history—as it focuses rather narrowly on one of the book’s eight case studies. One can learn far more about how the Panama Canal fits within the book as a whole by reviewing the following page, which commences the conclusion to this chapter. Even so, a reader of page 99 can glean certain insights about Earth Shapers, not least my (hopefully) accessible writing style and my commitment to finding surprising and intriguing events relevant to my book, as I portray the farcical story of US forces passive-aggressively playing rock music to smoke Panama’s controversial general Manuel Noriega out of the Vatican’s embassy. While the following page is more explicit about this point, page 99 also hints at the USA’s close interest in Panamanian political affairs, a reality that endures, albeit primarily now in relation to China’s geopolitical influence, to the present day.

Visit Maxim Samson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Ivermee's "Glorious Failure"

Robert Ivermee is a historian of British and wider European colonialism in South Asia. He is Associate Professor at Sciences Po Grenoble, and the author of Hooghly: The Global History of a River.

Ivermee applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Glorious Failure: The Forgotten History of French Imperialism in India, and shared the following:

Page 99 introduces one of the most important Indian characters in Glorious Failure, the Tamil merchant and official Ananda Ranga Pillai. The page presents Pillai’s background and explains how, through his family connections and commercial dealings, he became one of the wealthiest residents of the French colony of Pondicherry on the Coromandel Coast. It then outlines Pillai’s involvement with the French East India Company, first as a commercial agent and later as chief advisor to the governor at Pondicherry, Joseph François Dupleix. The page notes that Dupleix relied heavily on the polyglot Ananda, who spoke Tamil, French and Persian, to organise the Company’s trade with the local Tamil community and conduct diplomacy with Indian courts. It adds that Ananda kept a journal covering some twenty-five years of his life. For historians, this journal is an outstanding primary source on events at Pondicherry and in wider south India from 1736 to 1761.

Readers opening Glorious Failure to page 99 would understand that Ananda and Dupleix were important figures in the history of French India. They would get an insight into French eighteenth century commercial operations in the Indian Ocean. Some perceptive readers might note that the French presence in South Asia was not only commercial, as the presence of a French governor at Pondicherry and the mention of diplomacy with Indian courts suggests. However, readers turning directly to page 99 would get little sense of how, during the governorship of Dupleix, France became a major territorial power in southern and central India. The key argument of Glorious Failure – that France acted as an aggressive imperial power on the subcontinent, establishing an empire through force – is not clearly stated on this page. The Page 99 Test therefore does not work very well for the book.

Page 99 falls early in chapter five of Glorious Failure, which is devoted to the crucial years of French imperial expansion on the subcontinent (1739-1751). The pages that follow explain how, capitalising on its military superiority over local powers, France installed compliant rulers in different Indian courts before taking direct control of large swathes of territory in the Carnatic and the Deccan. Within a decade, however, France’s nascent empire in India had collapsed in the face of internal weakness, hostility from Indian powers, and conflict with Great Britain.

Learn more about Glorious Failure at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jake P. Smith's "The Ruin Dwellers"

Jake P. Smith is associate professor of history at Colorado College.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Ruin Dwellers: Progress and Its Discontents in the West German Counterculture, with the following results:

Page 99 of The Ruin Dwellers is peculiar in that it serves as the last page of a chapter and only contains two complete sentences. The sentences — which read: “In order to keep the feeling of perpetual breakthrough alive, then, youth activists needed to engage in ever more radical acts of transgressive destruction and consistently widen the scope of negation. As the next chapter shows, this strategy proved very difficult to sustain.” — are meant to serve as a connecting thread which gather up the ideas from one chapter and project them into the next. Although rather cryptic when taken on its own, I nonetheless feel that this page does indeed provide the reader with a good sense of the book.

I say this for a few reasons.

First, the lines on page 99 introduce the main protagonists of the book, namely the youth activists of the early 1980s who, taking inspiration from the apocalyptic aesthetics emerging from the punk and New Wave movements and from the forms of domestic world building being cultivated by housing activists, developed novel modes of urban activism and novel ways of engaging with (and critiquing) progressive time.

Second, the lines on page 99 mention some of the central theoretical concepts of the book including transgression, negation, and perpetual breakthrough, all of which point to the book's overarching theoretical interest in the temporal logics of modernity. The overarching argument of the book is that leftist activists in the early 1980s challenged and modified some of the ascendant temporal logics associated with progressive modernity and that the oft-derided temporal shift towards the past evident in late twentieth-century leftist thought and practice should be understood not as a romantic rejection of futurity but rather as part of a critical occupation of the logics of progress, one that explored the potential of what Svetlana Boym has called the “off modern.”

So, while page 99 might not give readers a full sense of the book's arguments, it does indeed reflect some of the book's larger concerns.

Learn more about The Ruin Dwellers at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ning Leng's "Politicizing Business"

Ning Leng is an Assistant Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University. For the year of 2025-2026, she a Wilson China Fellow at the Wilson Center.

Leng applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Politicizing Business: How Firms Are Made to Serve the Party-State in China, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Politicizing Business, the book is just beginning a comparison between two cities and the divergent fate of their private bus firms. It’s starting to dig into a short history of the bus sectors in these two cities—full of fun stories (though not quite on this page yet)—to introduce one of the book’s key concepts: “visibility projects.” These are political showcases dreamed up by politicians and bureaucrats, and a political service often demanded of firms in China, and as this book shows, they can be damaging to the private sector.

And so, no, if readers open my book and turn straight to page 99, they will not get a full sense of the entire book. But readers will immediately see that “visibility projects” is an important concept and that it contributes to the demise of the private bus companies in Chinese cities. If readers are not deterred by the mundaneness of the bus sector, page 99 might prompt them to flip backward to learn what visibility projects are—a salient feature of China’s economy and urban planning—and then forward to discover how such projects “killed” a private sector. Upon landing on this page, some might wonder: is the whole book just about buses?! Should I put it down now? In fact, buses occupy only two of the book’s eight chapters, and in this author’s humble view, the sector is anything but dull. Those who read on from page 99 into the heart of Chapter Five will find vivid accounts of how bus firms interact with city governments and attempt to resist official projects in an authoritarian system, where firms do not have full property rights protection.

And just to keep readers on their toes, the next two chapters venture into another thrilling sector: waste incineration. These four chapters (Chapters 4–7) form the empirical core of this political economy book, which examines how the Chinese government politicizes business and what happens when firms become politicized. As readers may have guessed by now, the kind of politicization described here goes well beyond the usual examples—such as pressuring companies to create jobs or assist in monitoring and surveillance. Politicization, much like these seemingly unremarkable sectors, can be quiet yet transformative. When firms are treated as part of the political system itself, they are asked to alter their operations in subtle but far-reaching ways to serve the state and its officials.

Visit Ning Leng's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marc James Carpenter's "The War on Illahee"

Marc James Carpenter grew up in Oregon and now works as associate professor of history at the University of Jamestown in North Dakota. He has published in American Indian Quarterly, Oregon Historical Quarterly, and Settler Colonial Studies.

Carpenter applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest, and shared the following:

Page 99 of The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest falls at the end of Chapter 3, and thus has only a few sentences of text:

...[it was] the invaders who started the wars, and the invaders who threatened to 'war forever' until they had gotten what they wanted. American aggression, not Native resistance to that aggression, caused just about every escalation of the War on Illahee—and arguably, just about every U.S. war for land fought across the North American continent.

Although this excerpt doesn't capture the core of the book, it does point to central themes of violence, deception, and manipulated narratives. One point I am making in this chapter is that the habit in American history of periodizing "Indian wars" from a given act of violence from a Native person tends to obscure deeper reasons behind that violence. The 1855 Yakima War portion of the War on Illahee, discussed here, is typically periodized as beginning with the killing of American agent Andrew Jackson Bolon, rather than with the trespassing American rapists whose executions Bolon was threatening genocide to avenge, or with the American decision to respond to a suspected murder with massive military force rather than investigation or diplomacy. More broadly, I argue, there is a norm treating American invasion and "Indian wars" differently than we discuss other invasions and other wars. Elsewhere across history, invaders are usually presumed to be the aggressors. Why not talk the same way about Americans invading Indigenous lands?

We still depict American invaders as defenders in part due to a longstanding culture of cover-ups. I have been able to show that a number of historians, politicians, and pioneers deliberately created false histories for profit and posterity. In a way, this book project began from a place of angry bewilderment, wondering how I, as an Oregonian passionate about history, had lived more than a quarter century without hearing much about the often-genocidal violence perpetrated in my home state. Deep in the archives, I found a big part of the answer: legions of people who preferred honor over truth had skillfully and deliberately distorted history, while keeping enough private records that I could still figure out what they did. My hope is that by proving these cover-ups, I can spur readers to more broadly reconsider histories they thought they knew.

Learn more about The War on Illahee at the Yale University Press website.

--Mashal Zeringue