Knowing books : the consciousness of mediation in eighteenth-century Britain / Christina Lupton.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lupton, Christina.

Series:

Material texts.

Material Texts

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--18th century--History and criticism--Theory, etc.

English literature.

Mediation in literature.

Self-consciousness (Awareness) in literature.

Literature publishing--Great Britain--History--18th century.

Literature publishing.

Books and reading--Great Britain--History--18th century.

Books and reading.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (199 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, c2012.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The eighteenth century has long been associated with realism and objective description, modes of representation that deemphasize writing. But in the middle decades of the century, Christina Lupton observes, authors described with surprising candor the material and economic facets of their own texts' production. In Knowing Books Lupton examines a variety of eighteenth-century sources, including sermons, graffiti, philosophical texts, and magazines, which illustrate the range and character of mid-century experiments with words announcing their status as physical objects. Books that "know" their own presence on the page and in the reader's hand become, in Lupton's account, tantalizing objects whose entertainment value competes with that of realist narrative.Knowing Books introduces these mid-eighteenth-century works as part of a long history of self-conscious texts being greeted as fashionable objects. Poststructuralist and Marxist approaches to literature celebrate the consciousness of writing and economic production as belonging to revolutionary understandings of the world, but authors of the period under Lupton's gaze expose the facts of mediation without being revolutionary. On the contrary, their explication of economic and material processes shores up their claim to material autonomy and economic success. Lupton uses media theory and close reading to suggest the desire of eighteenth-century readers to attribute sentience to technologies and objects that entertain them. Rather than a historical study of print technology, Knowing Books offers a humanist interpretation of the will to cede agency to media. This horizon of theoretical engagement makes Knowing Books at once an account of the least studied decades of the eighteenth century and a work of relevance for those interested in new attitudes toward media in the twenty-first.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Prologue

Introduction. Giving Power to the Medium

Chapter 1. Powerlessness as Entertainment

Chapter 2. What It-Narratives Know About Their Authors

Chapter 3. The Theory of Paper

Chapter 4. Sermons Written on the Screen of Print

Chapter 5. Gray and Mackenzie Printing on the Wall

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781283897006

1283897008

9780812205213

0812205219

OCLC:

822017886