Piper 2009

Piper, Andrew. Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age. University of Chicago Press, 2009. Print.

• Focus on this as a methodological example

Introduction

• 4 [Important: imaginary in and of books]

Learning how to read books and how to want books did not simply occur through the technological, commercial, or legal conditions that made the growing proliferation of books possible. The making of such bibliographical fantasies was also importantly a product of the vary narratives and symbolic operations contained within books as well.

• 6 scriptural pre 1800: CLP would caution us not to turn too far away from the scriptural in the C19
• 10 As Albrecht Koschorke has argued in his anthropological study of the rise of C18 Schriftskultur, "A media theory that seeks to explain such self-revolutionary processes as completely as possible must develop a methodology to understand the interdependence of technological mediality and semiosis, the narrow overlap of the 'form' and 'content' of such signifying events.... A history of literature is thus integral to a history of books. Literature makes books as much as books make literature."
  • l/u Garrett Stewart, Dear Reader: The Conscripted Reader in C19 British Fiction
  • method: how "romantic literary works acted as interpretations of and interactions with the bibliographic environment in which they appeared" (12)
• 12 ...it was the romantic age that bequeathed us this opposition between technics and aesthetics that is in many ways still operative today
  • Marc Redfield, Ina Ferris
• he keeps talking about there being "too many books to read" in the Romantic age - but this is what Ann Blair also charts in the 17th century
  • and this may be where the literary history can come back in: the imaginary and material responses shifting to the same affective reaction
• l/u TH Horne, Introduction to the Study of Bibliography (1814)
• 14 Unlike Walter Benjamin's claim that "the birthing room of the novel is the individual in his loneliness," novel reading and novel writing for writers like Goethe, Scott, and Balzac required attention to the elaborate bibliographic horizon in which novels proliferated and circulated.
• 15 Literature in books dramatized the complex interactions between the owning and the disowning of speech that inhered in the modern blbliographic landscape, the paradox of retaining while disseminating that grew increasingly problematic the more anonymous and abstract the processes of reception and circulation became.
• 16 In arguing for the necessary alignment of a media and linguistic comparativism, I not only want to contribute to the ongoing challenge to disciplinary boundaries today. I also want to try to help move us away from the study of individual media and draws attention instead to larger media "ecologies," how individuals express themselves and interact with one another by using a variety of different media, modes of speech, and languages.

Ch 1: Networking

• 20 twin c19 aesthetic ideals of personality and totality...of material completeness and personal essences [in the 1890s Weimar Edition of Goethe]
  • The Goethe of the Weimar Edition was to provide the spiritual edifice that sturdied the walls of the national Burg
• 21 Goethe collecting himself into a personal archive
• 22 The meaning of G's late work was always deeply and self-consciously intertwined with the changing conditions of communication in which it was produced.
• 23 bibliographic & narrative spaces <--> manuscriptural & biographical perspectives (former marginalized by latter)
  • the formal and discursive variety of the narrative of Wilhelm Meister's Travels necessarily also bibliographic
• 24 Schlegel: "In the next generation the novel will take the place of the encyclopedia"
  • xforming work > network -- this not anachronistic or a product of the digital
• 26 The novel's success depended upon a capability not only to be everywhere at the same time but also to incubate rhetorically and narratively such imaginative everywhereness.
• 30 the excerpts and omissions in the Travels publication in various miscellany forms and settings before a complete work (that it referred to but which did not exist yet) highlights "the question of where the Travels was located"
• 33 the way the term "novel" (which G removed from the second part of Travels) had come to signify "bibliographic unity and autonomy that readers had come to imagine when they read or bought a novel" thus showing the work's "incorporation within a larger textual cosmos"
• 34 collection as selection in Collected Works, highlighting what has been left out (pushing on novelistictotaluty again)
• 36 The "version," as opposed to the "edition," articulated a particular understanding of bibliographic culture as both diffuse and increasingly interconnected.
• 37-8 turning to the intertextual and hypertextual (Genette) poetics of a scene in Travels - repetition, omission, and transformation in reference - literary parallel (?) to the bibliographical networkedness
• 44 [symbol of a key pointing back to the first book] G conceived of the novel no longer as a key to real historical persons or a spatial and psychic interiority but as a pointer to a codicological elsewhere. In place of the hermeneutic principles of linking a text to the world or penetrating the mystery of its meaning, the key as magnetized arrow framed reading as an art of bibliographic connectivity. The book did not point to a world or a self but to more books.
• 46 ...the ways the figure of the body offered an important site to work through the changing realities of communication that structured both the interactions between bodies and the boundaries of those bodies. As the work of Koshorke has done so much to show, just as changes in media technologies lead to transformations of cultural understandings of the human body - of the physical skins and interfaces that both enclose and connect us - so also is thinking about the body an key means of thinking about the impact of new media. A poetics of the body is at once a poetics of media
  • printed book as skeletal structure of the literary work
  • McLuhan The Extensions of Man
• 50 the technological prosthetic spaces of both the book and the novel...novel and book were refigured as prophetic, radiant, technological compounds

Ch 2 Copying

• 54-5 this whole section v good on collected editions (Weiland, Scott, Balzac, Irving, James)
  • "Like other collecting practices, the collected edition has the capacity to organize a voluminous amount of material within a defined bibliographic space. Yet unlike Collected formats such as the miscellany, the critical edition, or the publisher's series, which always depended upon and negotiated the mixedness of their collectivity, the collected edition argued for a fundamental homogeneity of its contents through the overwhelming promotion of the author as the single organizing figure behind he collection."
  • spatial as well as "temporal continuity through the reproduction of already extant texts"
  • "a classic was a work whose identity depended upon a fundamental aspect of reproducibility"
  • collected edition as intervention in lit history but what about the contemporary practice of disbinding? Not as much publishing -- institutional and individual bibliophilic collecting practice -- but there's a difference there
  • also this could be seen as playing into the prioritization of the First Folio F1 as the monumental edition of shakespeare in early c19
• 56 imagining the reproducibility of authorial singularity even if technologically the press doesn't print the same thing twice (debating Tanselle and St Clair)
• 58 in forming a literary elite, the collected edition was also contributing to the establishment of a political commons. The more collected editions unified and stabilized an author's works, the more such works could paradoxically circulate among the populace.
  • Anderson print nationalism, Habermas public sphere
• 59 authorial portraits in collected eds - "...the format of the collected edition contributed to and grew out of the idea of literature as an index of personality." And authorial heroic individuality
• 60 The collected ed's increasing reliance on publishing the author's diaries, notes, and correspondence...was not only a way of marketing the edition's novelty ...It also increasingly aligned the join with the category of the author's private life and way afrom the history of the author's publications.
• 64 ...the capitalization of repetition as a cultural and literary value
• 65 Novella collections inspired by Decameron like Dickens's Pickwick Papers "emerged to address the problem of literary repetition and the bibliographic copy"
  • "steady and growing orientation towards writing as reproduction" in combining previously published periodical novellas into a novella collection (Hoffmann's Serapion Brothers)
• 75 ...perhaps the story of the double [v common romantic doppelgänger trope] - the story about the proliferation of sameness - offered an extremely attractive plot to address a communicative world defined by increasingly reproducible cultural objects.
  • what about doubles in Armadale (Collins, 1866)?
  • not about psychologization but "material reality of a new communications environment"
  • linking the material conditions of copying and profilerating editions to the poetics of uncanny doubling and repetition
• 81 The format of the collected edition legitimized not only a particular way of classifying literature but also...emphatically aligned reading with repetition, indeed, it figured reading as repetition
  • rem of Lynch 2014 on loving literature as rereading
• 83 interesting on collected edition as consolidated as stable but also the way that reproducibility is unstable

Ch 3 Processing

• 85 transition to vertically integrated publisher model (cf Sutherland 1976) and the new philological enthusiasm for editing "correlated to the increasing sophistication of the bibliographic environment" at the turn of the c19
• 86 In the broad array of material that they recovered and made available - the ballads, folk songs, fairy tales... of an earlier age - romantic editors functioned as an essential source of literary innovation, contributing in important ways to the increasing generic mixing, the "Gattungverschlungenheit" [genre devouring] in Georg Lukacs's words, that was one of the hallmarks of early c19 literature.
• 87 in their attention to practices of transmission from Ms or oral "editors played an essential part in contributing to a C19 media imaginary...the fundamental intermediality of literary culture"
• the romantic editor embodied a larger negotiation with historical, linguistic, generic, and medial alterity.
• 88 The figure of the editor and the practices of the editor underwent a major shift in the literary imagination, from the source of inspiration to that of a problem.
  • early c19 author editors like Scott > Browning's distaste for Wolf's Prologomena in "Homer" (1888)
• "I want to cross the disciplinary boundaries that have traditionally walled off a history of scholarship from a history of literature to see how editing and authoring, creating and correcting, were in fact integrally intertwined"
• 90-2 contestedness of editorial practices of changing language in transmitted texts between late c18 and early c19 ("Erneuung")
• 92-3 There was in essence a theory of media and mediation embedded in Lachmann's thinking: the written document constituted a fall from the garden of the author's mind. Fidelity to a single manuscript meant infidelity to the original author or work.
  • i.e. Lachmann stemmatics
• 97 editing as revealing originality: "As with any edition, the editor produced the author, but with the critical edition, the equation worked according to the logic of revelation: the more the editor did, the more one saw the author emerge in all of his original and singular splendor."
  • reinforcing romantic authorship even as it's a composite material practice
• 98 Paula McDowell: romantic ballad revival excluded print broadside in favor of orality, which seeds our understanding of oral cultures to this day
• 99 The ballad revival was always intensely mediated through the bibliographic practices of collection and correction.
  • the ballad's bookishness: can the same be said about novelistic realism?
• ...the way [the ballad] signified as a genre not just time [historically] itself but the dual problems of literary ownership and textual stability
• 101 Understand[ing] the way the novel, and Scott's novels in particular, emerged in the early c19 within a bibliographic context that was programmatically attentive to the transcription, correction, and reproduction of historical narrative material.
• 110 author of historical novel as collector and mediator: the prefaces to "Scott's novels...exhibit the very multipcilty of sources upon which the composition of the historical novel is based. They highlight the collecting and the collectivity that was at the heart of both projects, whether edition or novel. The explicit foregrounding of such a transmissional poetics drew attention to the mediating figure responsible for the interweaving of these textual parts", of the found objects of his novels
• 113ff nice close analysis of mediation of speech acts in Heart of Midlothian inc how a chapter epigram from Shakespeare's Hamlet situates narrative events >> "Scott's novel dramatized..the necessary overlap between the practices of preservation, transmission, and attribution that were underwriting the novel's rise to prominence in the C19." (119)

Ch 4 Sharing

• 121 impt of sharing to the culture of c19 miscellanies: "the part, imparting, and parting with"
• 122 collected edition organized around author, miscellany around "the figure of the reader" (Barbara Benedict -- cf Potential Collecting Sources List)
  • "elsewhere and afterward, transmission and excision" impt miscellany strategies (Ina Ferris)
• 123 miscellanies mapping "serially appearing collections" onto seasons with gift book annuals ("naturalization of literature and the book") but also the move from "the cyclicality to the seriality of cultural production" characteristic of c19 mass media more generally. Also the feminization and domestication of the book (125 -- Frauentaschenbücher, ladies' pocket books)
  • Kathryn Ledbetter the person for this
  • promoted fragmentary rather than fluid sequential reading
  • Natalie Zemon Davis, "Beyond the Market"
• 129 importance of manuscript space (for inscription btwn friends) alongside printed within miscellany book object, "an invitation to cross the boundaries between reader and author and produce the presence of multiple hands on the page"
  • l/u Leigh Hunt's intro to The Keepsake (1828): he invites readerly inscription of the material object between readers and marking up of the text as bearer of ideas to generate more writing (133) - "the critical act of selection" (134), the miscellany as a space for literary work
• 137 difference btwn commonplace book and miscellany: not adapting fragments into individual blank space but "inscrib[ing] the individual into a book already composed of textual parts... Far from signaling the repersonalization of the printed book, handwriting was an entry point into an interpersonal public space."
• 138 again the poetic turn: "...the very predominant poetics of the hollow in romantic miscellanies can be read as a reply to the typographic hollows that predominated in those miscellanies"
  • Poe's "pit and the pendulum," pub in The Gift for 1843, in which "the hero's heart is alternately threatens by a 'pocket' and by 'periodicity'"
  • here we could also think the pocket books, hollows full of fragmentary texts, in novels including Armadale (Collins, 1866)
• 141 Washington Irving, like the miscellany "so central and so marginal to literary history" -- he argues irving's decline is that of the miscellany in which his work prospered (142)
• 147 Laura Mandell: miscellany writings dramatize "productive consumption," a projection to produce more writing
• 152 at pains to illustrate the importance of sharing (of common right vs copyright) through the miscellany