Apologies, dear reader, but comments on all the Wordherders blogs are currently disabled due to technical problems. If you feel a keen urge to respond, please do so on your own blog and send a trackback to this entry. Alternately, email me at my gmail account non.zombie, and I'll post your comment.
This post does not do a very good job of engaging with what posts at The Little Professor and The Valve have had to say about literature and history, but it's a start. (It's also connected to this Valve post, and to this one at Easily Distracted.) Consider this entry in the same family as these previous posts of mine:
Below is a stab at an entry on literature and history. But first, a caveat: my knowledge is strongest concerning seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, and I recognize that what holds true for those centuries in that particular part of the world does not hold true everywhere and always.
As a literary scholar who is also a book historian, I find myself unable to ignore the fact that works of literature exist as objects. They do not abstractly float around in the ether, only occasionally deigning to allow an inevitably imperfect copy of themselves to be translated into material form. They are words (and often images) drawn or printed on pages. They do not exist otherwise. As a result, a number of questions arise about any particular work of literature.
- Who created this object?
- Who distributed this object?
- Who owned this object?
- Who read this object?
The list of questions gets longer as we add How? Why? When? Where? questions to each of the above. I think it's safe to say that taken together, these are the core questions of the book historian. From this core, more ambitious inquiries are launched.
Many seemingly non-literary topics impinge upon these questions: Government licensing. Censorship laws. Copyright laws. Printing technology. Ink technology. Paper technology. Metal working technology (the casting of type, the creation of engravings and etchings). Labor laws & traditions (for those who worked in the printshop). Advertising. Distribution networks. Literacy rates. Taxes. Commercial competition.
If you want to read a very good take on these issues, go read Robert Darnton's "What is Book History?" in The Kiss of Lamourette (then read Adams' & Barker's "A New Model for the Study of the Book" in A Potencie of Life: Books in Society for a dissenting point of of view).
Go!... No? Still reading me? Okay...
Here in the early years of the twenty-first century, we find ourselves the inheritors of a recognized, though contested, literary canon. Where did this canon come from? It is possible to trace the acts of publication, of education, of taste-making that created a literary canon of Anglo-phone works of literature. Is it irrelevant to literary studies to take note of the key developments that allowed certain works to survive but that denied other works a wider, and historically longer audience? I ask this question because we have at our disposal the historical evidence of those key developments. We might disagree about the conclusions to be drawn, but the evidence is there.
Let me put this differently:
Are the tastes of readers and the creative talents of writers the only things that drive the creation and survival of the literary canon?
Some would say yes, that the literary tradition we have inherited represents the best that has ever been been created. The only reason any work of literature disappears, this argument goes, is because it just wasn't very good, or because readers did not care for it. I disagree with this point of view. However, I don't mean to argue here for an alternative canon, for a list of texts that deserve to be read instead of or in addition to the works many would currently hold up as canonical. Nor do I mean to argue against the idea of a canon itself. Rather, I'm interested in the steps that have led to the creation of the canon, any canon, as well as in the arguments that have taken place about canons. And the methods of book history are very useful for investigating these steps.
While the traditional view of "our" Anglophone "literary heritage" might be that only those works most deserving of merit have survived the "test of time," we have plenty of reasons to believe that other forces have played a significant role. And often we can see that these other forces were not acting in the service of literary aesthetics.
Technology
In the handpress era with which I am most familiar, printshops were commercial enterprises. Admittedly, many of their proprietors saw themselves as key participants in the dissemination of new ideas in science, religion, and philosophy, but without profits (and barring a wealthy patron with deep pockets), their participation would have been short lived. For a large number of copies--and a large number of editions--of a work to be produced, the individual copies needed to be affordable. No printshop was going to produce large numbers of publications that no one would buy.
Here's one interesting little development: Large books have typically been a good bit more expensive than smaller ones. And, according to Michael Twyman, in The British Library Guide to Printing, the production of smaller and smaller books "was made possible by the development of a greater range of smaller types...The small-format books published in the Low Countries in the seventeenth century...would not have been technically possible a century earlier" (34). Improbable as it might sound, the developing skills of metal workers--the ones who created type--could have had a direct bearing on the development of literature. If the only people who can afford to buy your books are the wealthy elite, then the content of your books will likely take their tastes into account. However, if you can make books more affordable, suddenly you start to pay attention to the tastes of those with less money to spend on any particular book.
Law
In the talk I attended a couple of weeks ago, William St. Clair argued that as intellectual property laws changed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, legal pressures made newer texts more expensive, less likely to be available in cheap editions. (And St. Clair's book has hundreds of pages of data in appendices from which he makes his arguments. He's not hypothesizing based on nothing.) Thus, St. Clair infers, the poor were constrained to read mostly older materials that were inexpensive for printers to make available because they were no longer copyrighted. As a result, those at the top had modern knowledge, while those at the bottom had superseded knowledge. (N.B. I'm writing these comments from my notes, which may be inaccurate.) As one post-lecture commenter pointed out, this argument ignores the role that lending libraries played, but otherwise I think St. Clair does a good job of linking economics, intellectual property laws, reading habits, and publishing patterns.
Test of time? Here is one place where the rubber hits the road. Within such a changing legal environment, would a bookseller choose to make available an older work of literature...
- ...because it was an example of great literature deserving of preservation and wider dissemination?
- ...or because it was out of copyright and thus represented a greater potential for profit than a newer work?
We can look at publishing records and say, "Aha! Text A was reprinted again and again and again. That must be because people liked it so much." Perhaps. But perhaps it survived because printers could make cheap copies and turn a quick profit. Had newer works been less bound up in copyright--i.e. free to be produced in cheap copies--they might have knocked those old perennials right out of the market.
Inferences
Well, I'm out of time right now, and the special collections room is just now opening, so I need to go.
More later...
