This book offers an original study of debates that arose in the 1790s about the nature and social role of literature and the new class of readers produced by the revolution in information and literacy in eighteenth-century England. The first part concentrates on the dominant arguments about the role of literature and the status of the author; the second shifts its focus to the debates about working-class activists and radical women authors, and examines the growth of a Romantic ideology within this context of political and cultural turmoil.

This ground-breaking collection of essays presents a new 'bookish' literary history, which situates questions about books at the intersection of a range of debates about the role of authors and readers, the organization of knowledge, the vogue for collecting, and the impact of overlapping technologies of writing and shifting generic boundaries.

Paul Keen explores how a consumer revolution which reached its peak in the second half of the eighteenth century shaped debates about the role of literature in a polite modern nation, and tells the story of the resourcefulness with which many writers responded to these pressures. From dream reveries which mocked their own entrepreneurial commitments, such as Oliver Goldsmith's account of selling his work at a 'Fashion Fair' on the frozen Thames, to the Microcosm's mock plan to establish 'a licensed warehouse for wit', writers insistently tied their literary achievements to a sophisticated...