The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period

ISBN-13: 9780521699440 / Angielski / Miękka / 2007 / 796 str.

William St Clair

Opis

Most people believed that reading significantly influenced minds, attitudes, and actions during the centuries when printed paper was the only means by which texts could travel across time and distance. William St. Clair offers a very different picture of the past from those presented by traditional approaches through quantified information he provides on book prices, print runs, intellectual property, and readerships gathered from over fifty publishing and printing archives.

Recenzje

' … an extraordinarily ambitious and impressive attempt to reformulate our knowledge of literary production and reception in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. With nearly 300 Circle pages devoted to thirteen appendices and bibliography, The Reading Nation is one of the most useful volumes ever published on Romantic literature.' Wordsworth Circle

Spis treści

Illustrations; Tables; Acknowledgments; Abbreviations; 1. Reading and its consequences; 2. Economic characteristics of the printed book industry; 3. Intellectual property; 4. Anthologies, abridgment, and the development of commercial vested interests in prolonging the obsolete; 5. The high monopoly period in England; 6. The explosion of reading; 7. The old canon; 8. Shakespeare; 9. Literary production in the Romantic period; 10. Manufacturing; 11. Selling, prices, and access; 12. Romance; 13. Reading constituencies; 14. Horizons of expectations; 15. 'Those vile French piracies'; 16. 'Preparatory schools for the brothel and the gallows'; 17. At the boundaries of the reading nation; 18. Frankenstein; 19. North America; 20. Reading, reception, and dissemination; 21. The romantic poets in the Victorian age; 22. The political economy of reading.