ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the representation, self-representation and non-representation, in literature, film, and other cultural forms, of those who do write - manuscripts and memos, forms and faxes. It draws on literature, film, and other cultural artefacts to interrogate the received understanding of the feminization of secretarial work at the end of the nineteenth century. The book begins with a reminder that men also performed secretarial labor, and that the iconic late-nineteenth-century female secretary is preceded by the mid-century male clerk. It traces another unexpected link between shorthand and the vicissitudes of male professionalization, uncovering a vast tum-of-the-century canon reprinted in shorthand. The book explores the ways in which typewriting was imagined as de-corporealizing writing, only to re-corporealize it in the conspicuously sexualized, yet simultaneously automatized, body of the female typist.
