The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700-1830 - Softcover

Siskin, Clifford

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801862841 ISBN 13: 9780801862847

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999

Synopsis

As today's new technologies challenge the reign of writing, Clifford Siskin puts our current concerns about such change into history. In the 18th and early 19th centuries in Britain, he argues, the "new" technology was writing itself. How did its proliferation―in print and through silent reading―coalesce into the dominant forms of literary modernity, and with what consequences?

What changed, strikingly and fundamentally, were ways of knowing and of working. Admonitions against young women reading novels were not merely matters of Augustan conservatism but signals of those shifts: they warned against the capacity of the technology to change those who used it. Despite such caution, Britain saw, between 1700 and 1830, the advent of both modern disciplinarity and modern professionalism. These new divisions of knowledge and of labor were the work of writing, as was the engendering, at their intersection, of the discipline that took writing itself as its professional work―Literature.

About this title

Book Description

"This book, like Siskin's first book, will be talked about, quoted, and used, both inside and outside the discipline. Its thesis is, by itself, worth the price of admission."―Kurt Heinzelman, University of Texas at Austin

About the Author

Clifford Siskin, author of The Historicity of Romantic Discourse, holds the Bradley Chair of English Literature at the University of Glasgow.

Edition details

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0801862841
• ISBN 13: 9780801862847
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 296