Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England
Cambridge University Press, 7/8/2010
EAN 9780521115346, ISBN10: 0521115345
Hardcover, 320 pages, 24.9 x 17.5 x 3.3 cm
Language: English
This pioneering exploration of Georgian men and women's experiences as readers explores their use of commonplace books for recording favourite passages and reflecting upon what they had read, revealing forgotten aspects of their complicated relationship with the printed word. It shows how indebted English readers often remained to techniques for handling, absorbing and thinking about texts that were rooted in classical antiquity, in Renaissance humanism and in a substantially oral culture. It also reveals how a series of related assumptions about the nature and purpose of reading influenced the roles that literature played in English society in the ages of Addison, Johnson and Byron; how the habits and procedures required by commonplacing affected readers' tastes and so helped shape literary fashions; and how the experience of reading and responding to texts increasingly encouraged literate men and women to imagine themselves as members of a polite, responsible and critically aware public.
1. The problem with reading
history and theory in the culture of Georgian England
Part I. Origins
2. 'Many sketches and scraps of sentiments'
what is a commonplace book?
3. A very short history of commonplacing
4. Commonplacing modernity
enlightenment and the necessity of note-taking
Part II. Form and Matter
5. 'A sort of register or orderly collection of things
Locke and the organisation of wisdom
6. The importance of being epigrammatic
7. Manufacturing an encyclopaedia
Part III. Readers and Reading
8. Critical autonomy and readership
9. Dexterity and textuality
the experience of reading
Part IV. Ancient and Modern
10. Sounding the muses' lyre
rhetoric and neo-classicism
11. Invention and imitation
practising the art of composition
Part V. Texts and Tastes
12. Taming the Bard
dramatic readings
13. Commonplacing and the modern canon
Part VI. Anatomising the Self
14. The selfish narrator
15. Self-made news
16. Reading excursions
on being transported
Envoi
17. The rise of the novel and the fall of commonplacing
conjoined narratives?
Bibliography
Index.