Representations of Book Culture in Eighteenth-Century English Imaginative Writing

Joanna Maciulewicz

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319926087
• eBook ISBN: 9783319926094
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book is a contribution to the new field of literary studies which is informed by book history and takes interest in the intersection of the ideal and material aspects of literature. It studies the ways eighteenth-century English novels, plays and poems illustrated the changes which the growth of literacy, the proliferation of writing and the emergence of print marketplace made in the social and cultural life of Britain and demonstrated the contingency of the emerging criticism on the technological and economic conditions of book production. The first part focusses on the representation of the tensions created by the emergence of literate society and on the hopes and fears awoken by the expansion of the cultural public sphere caused by the proliferation of print. The second part explores the contribution of literature to the shaping of the roles of authors, readers and patrons in the field of literary production.

© The Author(s) 2018

Joanna MaciulewiczRepresentations of Book Culture in Eighteenth-Century English Imaginative WritingNew Directions in Book Historyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92609-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Joanna Maciulewicz¹

(1)

Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poznań, Poland

Joanna Maciulewicz

End Abstract

In an essay from 1994, J. Paul Hunter described literary history as a “discourse of musology” since it traditionally avoids the subjects of “either the instruments of textual production or the dispersal and consumption of the textual product” (Hunter 1994, 41). The traditional understanding of literature employed by literary studies derives from the Romantic need to dissociate it from the material contexts of its creation, circulation and reception. However, in the period directly preceding the Romantic association of literature with creativity and imagination, literature had not been yet distinguished from the general body of writing and showed a great interest in the material contexts of the creation, circulation and reception of books. Novels, plays and poems recorded the mutual influence of books and history, illustrated the changes which the growth of literacy, the proliferation of writing and the emergence of the print marketplace made in the social and cultural life of Britain and demonstrated the contingency of critical concepts used to describe and regulate writing, such as authorship, literature or reading, on the social, economic and technological conditions of book production. It is the aim of this book to explore the way eighteenth-century imaginative discourse represented and shaped the emerging order of books and the order of literature, to use Roger Chartier’s and Lee Morrissey’s terms.

In this attempt to analyse how imaginative writing reflected on the emergence of the literate and literary world, the study combines the interests of literary criticism and the history of the book. The exploration of the connection, as J. Paul Hunter and Laura L. Runge pointed out in the introduction to Producing the Eighteenth-Century Book (2009), has “hardly begun in earnest” (Runge 2009, 14) and is still “hesitant and underdeveloped” (Hunter 2009, 8) although it promises to shed light on the previously neglected problem of “an intersection of material fact with literary interpretation and value” (Hunter 2009, 8). Imaginative literature thematising the problems of book creation, of its dissemination and reception, a branch of the kind of writing which Paula McDowell dubs the “history of mediation” (McDowell 2015, 567), may well be read as a source of knowledge of the impact of media shifts upon social and cultural life and as a part of the critical discourse defining the roles of agents in the field of literary production realigned by the growing literacy, the explosion of print after the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 and the professionalisation of literature and it is the aim of this book to analyse them in this way.

In the critical discourse, there is an enduring anxiety about the dependence of literature, or more generally, of knowledge on the material aspects of its creation, circulation and reception. D. F. McKenzie , who in his Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (1984) postulated the study of the interdependence of the material and ideal aspects of texts in the creation of meanings, detects it for example in John Milton’s description of books in Areopagitica, published in 1644. In the pamphlet, books are compared to “a viol” because “they preserve the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect which bred them” (Milton 2005, 346). McKenzie sees this metaphor as an apt expression of an “ultimately Platonic” tradition of treating a book as “a sacred but expressive form, one whose medium gives transparent access to the essential meaning” (McKenzie 1986, 32). Romantic and post-Romantic criticism was expected to achieve the same kind of detachment from the world of commerce and technology. The conviction is most explicitly formulated, as Michael Gavin observes (2012, 29), in Matthew Arnold ’s “Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1865), where criticism is defined as “a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world”. Arnold believes that spiritual and intellectual development requires freedom from “the intrusion of other considerations”. It “obeys an instinct prompting it to try to know the best that is known and thought in the world, irrespectively of practice, politics, and everything of the kind” (Arnold 2001 [1865], 824, 814). Such an idealistic approach towards criticism, which, as René Wellek pointed out, “Arnold made (…) the key to modern culture and the salvation of England” (1963, 31), was accordant with the understanding of literature and culture in contradistinction to the commercial and industrial reality.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, literary criticism did not eschew the subjects of literature’s contingency on the material or technological conditions of its creation and reception. For this reason, as Michael Gavin asserts, it proves an ideal source of evidence for book history. “Criticism from the past”, the critic says, “sits at the nexus of materiality and ideality” in the sense that it not only describes the practices of authorship, reading and the circulation of books but it also provides an insight into the ways various agents of the field of literary production conceptualised them (Gavin 2012, 27). Critical discourse freely addresses the double nature of the book which, like man, was seen to have a body and soul. The soul, however, was seen to be “co-created by the printers, compositors, and proofreaders who take care of the punctuation, spelling, and layout of the text” (Chartier and Stallybrass 2013, 188). Early criticism acknowledged the fact that the meanings of books are shaped not only by the authorial mind but also by the material contexts of the books’ creation, circulation and reception, so it responded to all the changes which were transforming England into a society of writers and readers.

It must be borne in mind, however, that at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of eighteenth-century literary criticism was still “undisciplined” (Gavin 2015, 5). It did not have either its own fixed genres of writing or a strictly defined area of interest since literature, the object of its interest, as Raymond Williams puts it in his Keywords, “corresponded mainly to the modern meanings of literacy” and to “the whole body of books and writing” (1988, 184, 185), or, as Eagleton specifies, to “the whole body of valued writing in society: philosophy, history, essays and letters, as well as poems” (1983, 17). Critical remarks on the broadly understood literature were included in various kinds of writing since criticism did not yet develop its own genres or institutions. It was “an open free-for-all without norms or boundaries” (Gavin 2015, 24). The role of the critic also lacked its own definition, which can be explained by the general “resistance of Enlightenment to expert cultures” (Kramnick 2002, 351). The only acceptable role of a critic, as Patey describes it, was that of an “amateur speaking to fellow amateurs” or of “a polite companion” or a “friend” who “engages in (…) commerce of conversation not from above but from within a social group he seeks to guide” (2005, 19). Even Addison’s and Steele’s essays, which are usually considered as the beginning of professional criticism, demonstrate an attempt “to dissolve literary commentary into an idea of shared culture” (Kramnick 2002, 350).

The reluctance to cede authority to expert readers of literature seems logical given the widespread popularity of critical discussions in eighteenth-century society. The critical spirit was awoken in English society with the emergence of a bourgeois public sphere defined by Jürgen Habermas as a social space in which private individuals came together with a view to engage in critical-rational debate on diverse cultural, political and social issues. The discussions and exchanges of opinions assumed variegated forms and used diverse media of communication. They were held in coffee houses, salons and periodicals. Writing and orality functioned side by side and influenced one another. In the atmosphere of the ubiquitous discussions, all individuals felt entitled to make critical judgements and did not feel the need to consult experts.

The subject that frequently provoked critical debates was “the newly disturbing technology” of writing, whose unprecedented surge, as Clifford Siskin observes, came in as a shock to the contemporaries (Siskin 1999, 2). Although the estimates of literacy rates in the past will most probably never be exact, it is safe to say that in the eighteenth century England was becoming a land of readers and writers. As James Raven points out in his Business of Books, by the mid-nineteenth century the process had been complete: “the great majority of the population of England daily encountered books, magazines, or newspapers” (2007, 1). The eighteenth century was in many respects the period of transition from an old world, where reading and writing were restricted to minorities, to a new world, where the two practices became an integral part of social life. The growing importance of literacy raised questions about the nature of its influence on individual experience as well as on the social and cultural order which permeated all kinds of discourse. It was also a dominant subject of diverse genres of writing. As Siskin aptly put it, “the new technology of writing gazed self-reflexively on its own unknown potential” (Siskin 1999, 2, 3), on its impact on society and culture but also the process of the construction of its own modes of operation.

The same critical spirit and the same self-reflexive tendency to explore its own nature informed imaginative writing. Siskin describes the capacity of the simultaneous representation and the transformation of writing as “novelism” and defines it as “the discursive site in which the naturalisation of writing is negotiated”. Writing, including imaginary writing, became “as much an object of inquiry as a means. (…) All writing became, in that sense, critical” (Siskin 1999, 176). Imaginative texts incorporated critical reflection, which was expressed by the full array of literary convention: it was included in the plots, in the forms of narration or manifested itself in the imitation of its genres or in the form of paratextual material, “one of the most prolific venues of novelism” (Siskin 1999, 177), and in this way contributed to developing the rules governing the literate and the literary world.

Novelism is not restricted to the novelistic discourse. The concept refers to all the genres whose essential quality was the “confounding of the creative and the critical” (Siskin 1999, 263) and in this sense it bears a strong resemblance to Bakhtin’s “novelisation of the genres” which manifests itself in the periods when the novel was becoming the dominant form of writing. “All literature is then caught up in the process of ‘becoming’, and in a special kind of ‘generic criticism’” (Bakhtin 1981, 5). It is more “free and flexible”, “permeated with laughter, irony, elements of self-parody”, but most significantly, it has “an indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality” (Bakhtin 1981, 7). This proximity to the unfolding reality, the unrestrained formal freedom and self-reflexivity make the literary texts perfect tools for the description of the logic of book culture and the negotiation of the roles of the agents of the literary field.

The convergence of literary and critical discourse in their aim to gain control over the literary field, as David Randall argues, is only natural, given the fact that “early modern literary discourse” and “the ancient public sphere” have a “common origin in the historically continuous intellectual tradition of European rhetoric” (2008, 221). The affinity of literature and rhetoric is most evident in the prologues of plays since this is the space where the author can “present his authority” just like “the orator sought to gain the goodwill of his audience by presenting his ethos in the introduction to his speech” (Randall 2008, 224). A paratext is so efficient as an instrument of the authorial influence on the audience since it is an intermediary space between literature and the world. Genette and Borges compare it to a “threshold” and a “vestibule” because “it is a zone between text and off-text, a zone of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of a pragmatics and a strategy” which the author can use to predispose the public to “a better reception for the text” or to instruct in “a more pertinent reading of it” (Genette 1997, 2). Paratexts, by virtue of their position, highlight literature’s embedment in the world and show that its position, value and conventions are subject to negotiations with the audience. In this sense, paratextual material “is what enables a text to become a book and to be offered as such to its readers and, more generally, to the public (Genette 1997, 1).

The literariness of criticism is what made it effective, of which John Dryden’s paratexts can be a perfect example. “Dryden’s poetical and critical texts”, as Sebastian Domsch explains, “are always intimately coupled” (2014, 122) and it is the very proximity of these two kinds of writing that is a source of authority. For Dryden “only poetic genius enabled true criticism” (Domsch 2014, 115). Criticism was an integral part of the poetic performance and was formulated in response to the contexts of poetic creation and reception: “as this or that work appeared it was accompanied by an effort to improve the occasion by discussing literary principles or matters otherwise suggested by the work in hand” (Atkins 1966, 107). The inconsistencies which resulted from such a method of practising criticism only testified to its creative nature and showed that “[i]t is itself a performative act, the significance of which happened while it is being p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. From Orality to Script: Literacy, Autonomy and Authority in Clarissa
• 3. Script, Print and the Materiality of Texts
• 4. The Stories of Reading in the Eighteenth-Century Novels
• 5. The Authors’ Search for Creative Autonomy
• 6. Midwives of the Muses: Representations of the Transformation of Literary Patronage
• 7. Conclusion
• Back Matter