Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750–1800

This book explores the ways that authors responded to fundamental questions about literature during an age of accelerating change.

Paul Keen (Author)

9781107016675, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 2 February 2012

268 pages, 8 b/w illus.
23.5 x 16 x 1.8 cm, 0.56 kg

'It is impossible to do justice to the breadth of reference in this book … Every page has an entertaining and pertinent story, and every story makes one want to return to the primary sources. There is also a detailed bibliography for those who wish to pursue differing element of his debate.' Anna Brunton, British Society for Literature and Science Reviews

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 understanding of the uncertain complexities of a modern transactional society. This book combines a new understanding of late eighteenth-century literature with the materialist and sociological imperatives of book history and theoretically inflected approaches to cultural history.

1. The ocean of ink: a long introduction
2. Balloonomania: the pursuit of knowledge and the culture of the spectacle
3. Bibliomania: the rage for books and the spectacle of culture
4. Foolish knowledge: the little world of microcosmopolitan literature
5. Uncommon animals: literary professionalism in the age of authors
6. The learned pig: enlightening the reading public
7. Afterword: a swinish multitude: the tyranny of fashion in the 1790s
8. Works cited.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]