Institutions of Literature, 1700–1900

Jon Mee, Matthew Sangster

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781108830201
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108905985
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Publishing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This collection provides students and researchers with a new and lively understanding of the role of institutions in the production, reception, and meaning of literature in the period 1700–1900. The period saw a fundamental transition from a patronage system to a marketplace in which institutions played an important mediating role between writers and readers, a shift with consequences that continue to resonate today. Often producers themselves, institutions processed and claimed authority over a variety of cultural domains that never simply tessellated into any unified system. The collection's primary concerns are British and imperial environments, with a comparative German case study, but it offers encouragement for its approaches to be taken up in a variety of other cultural contexts. From the Post Office to museums, from bricks and mortar to less tangible institutions like authorship and genre, this collection opens up a new field for literary studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Literature and Institutions
• Chapter 1 Knowledge Exchange in the Seventeenth Century: From the Third University to the Royal Society
• Chapter 2 ‘Supporting Mutual Benevolence’: Libraries, Civic Benefaction, and the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society, 1709–1755
• Chapter 3 Institutions without Addresses
• Chapter 4 Eighteenth-Century Musenhof Courts as Bridges and Brokers for Cultural Networks and Social Reform
• Chapter 5 Becoming Institutional: The Case of the Anacreontic Society
• Chapter 6 Circulating Libraries as Institutional Creators of Genres
• Chapter 7 Lecturing Networks and Cultural Institutions, 1740–1830
• Chapter 8 Catalogues as Instituting Genres of the Nineteenth-Century Museum: The Two Hunterians
• Chapter 9 Charles Lamb and the British Museum as an Institution of Literature
• Chapter 10 A Disruptive and Dangerous Education and the Wealth of the Nation: The Early Mechanics’ Institutes
• Chapter 11 ‘The Ladies’ Contribution’: Women and the Mechanics’ Institute on the Goldfields of Victoria
• Chapter 12 ‘[L]etters Must Increase’: Reading and Writing the Post Office as a Literary Institution
• Chapter 13 Networks, Nodes, and Beacons: Cultural Institutions in Nineteenth-Century Southeast Asia
• Chapter 14 The Book as Medium
• Index