Leckie 2015

Leckie, Barbara. “ON PRINT CULTURE: MEDIATION, PRACTICE, POLITICS, KNOWLEDGE.” Victorian Literature and Culture 43.4 (2015): 895–907. Web.

• 895: Book history is a new field with relatively clear demarcations, whereas print culture includes book history and so much else. If book history leans toward (but is not defined by) material culture and print culture leans toward (but is not defined by) political culture, there is no question that print culture also embraces material culture. Indeed, there is no question that print culture gains its energy, in part, from the very "communications circuit" -- Darnton's oft-cited phrase -- that book history embraces.
  • So, book history : material culture :: print culture : political culture?
• 896: ...Chartier identifies the nineteenth century itself as "the age of the second revolution of the book"
  • in intro to The Culture of Print: Power, and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe. Princeton, 1989.
• 897: The broad strokes I have sketched in here pertain more to periodical and newspaper culture than to book culture and contribute to two distinctive features of print culture as it relates to the press: its capacity to shape publics and counter-publics and, related to this point, its role in the organization of knowledge. In addition to communicating and producing knowledge, periodical and newspaper culture also defined new forms of knowledge - fragmented, patchwork, non-linear, immediate - that are discussed in many of the books under review here.
• 898: theoretical indebtedness of book history field to Habermas, Benedict Anderson, and Pierre Bourdieu in particular
• 899: By contrast to the 1830s and 40s, however, Miller illustrates [In Slow Print] that by the 1880s and 90s writers were less sanguine about the benefits of mass circulation and mass culture.
  • this focus on delineating sub-periods within the Victorian period is underdone
• 900: each of the writers she [Miller] addresses struggles, in different ways, to confront a perceived sense that print culture in its late-century forms was no longer realizing radical political goals; indeed, as Marx predicted with respect to capitalism in general, print culture was at once absorbing critiques and repackaging them in forms more conducive to the promotion of existing conditions than their demise.
• 901: I want to make a pitch for mediation as one lens through which to understand Victorian print culture. Mediation recurs as an idea, if not a word, in most of the works discussed here in at least three ways: first, it highlights print as a medium; second, it signals print as an always mediated form (mediated by printers, publishers, booksellers, editors, readers, censors, and so on); and third, it signals the ways in which meaning itself is always mediated and, accordingly, inextricable from the production of knowledge.
• 902-3: Generalizations are always risky and prone to be challenged but here are a few that emerged from the books under review. Critics who adopt print culture perspectives are often inclined to situate their studies in the context of the Enlightenment, the public sphere, and politics; they are accordingly attuned to print as a practice, a politics, and a mode for the organization of knowledge. They always draw on periodicals or newspapers and they are likely also to extend the range of print forms consulted to include items like train timetables, advertising circulars, posters, book wrappers, pamplets, and so on as well as a range of literary genres. They are likely to engage with at least two dimensions of the communications circuit; they do not, in other words, look at print in isolation from other social, political, economic, material, and use factors. In the context of both the extension of the range of print and the sense of print's engagement with material practices, they are keenly aware of print in relation to mediation: print as a medium that draws our attention to mediation; and print as generative of cultural practices that invoke mediation - with its affinity to interactivity, intertextuality, and what Linda Hughes calls "sideways" methodologies - in relation to the production of knowledge. In theory, this last line of inquiry extends to an analysis of print culture itself as a mediating category (as Brake suggests in her early essay and others develop although there is certainly more room for this sort of analysis in Victorian studies).
• 903 Linda Hughes's city and network metaphors -- read against Levine on Bleak House