Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England

The first full-length study of the commonplace book in the eighteenth century.

David Allan (Author)

9781107421837, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 10 July 2014

320 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.43 kg

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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Literary studies: general [DSB], Literary theory [DSA], Literature & literary studies [D]