The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period

This 2004 book investigates how the national culture can be understood through a study of books that were read.

William St Clair (Author)

9780521699440, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 4 January 2007

796 pages, 22 b/w illus. 13 tables
22.5 x 16.6 x 4.3 cm, 1.06 kg

' … 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

During the four centuries when printed paper was the only means by which texts could be carried across time and distance, everyone engaged in politics, education, religion, and literature believed that reading helped to shape the minds, opinions, attitudes, and ultimately the actions, of readers. In this 2004 book, William St Clair investigates how the national culture can be understood through a quantitative study of the books that were actually read. Centred on the Romantic period in the English-speaking world, but ranging across the whole print era, it reaches startling conclusions about the forces that determined how ideas were carried, through print, into wider society. St Clair provides an in-depth investigation of information, made available here for the first time, on prices, print runs, intellectual property, and readerships gathered from over fifty publishing and printing archives. He offers a picture of the past very different from those presented by traditional approaches. Indispensable to students of English literature, book history, and the history of ideas, the study's conclusions and explanatory models are highly relevant to the issues we face in the age of the internet.

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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]