At one major publishing house, there is a running joke that the second book published on the Gutenberg press was about the death of the publishing business. While this joke is an obvious exaggeration, there is a certain amount of truth that with each advance in technology, with each printing innovation or invention, a similar death dynamic occurred. This was most noticeable during the tumultuous years of the eighteenth century when a veritable flood of printing techniques, business practices, reading formats, and sources for reading material was introduced. The cultural reaction to each new technological change, while not exactly the same in all respects, exhibited a series of characteristics that closely mirrored each other. In each case, readers reacted in various ways against the innovation and supported the traditional publishing industry and, in their reaction, created, modified, and maintained a sense of their own identity.

During the early part of the eighteenth century, the growth of the book trades depended upon a series of technological advances. With each innovation, new forms of printed material, such as newspapers, essays, novels, and biographies became available and in many cases, extremely popular. Cultural perceptions of popularity among the growing body of readers, however, immediately relegated most of these new forms to a subaltern status. As the new readers became new writers, subcultures developed around each new form, which then changed the perceived social status of both the members of the subculture and the textual form. Even though printed materials has often been seen as simple commodities, reading subcultures of the eighteenth century had the power to redefine the social meaning of a given textual form and they often did so because in changing the status of the text they could also alter their own status. The members of these various subcultures used their associated textual form as a means to redefine their own identity as well as the social status of the text itself. Each of the varieties of publications gained or lost social status based upon their association with particular subcultures. In this way, the formation of textual subcultures provided a conduit through which individuals could create, maintain, and renegotiate personal identity. By examining the creation of specific textual subcultures in conjunction with shifts in technology, my work offers a new, empirically supported model for understanding the precise relationship between reading and identity formation at the moment when modern, market-based culture came into existence. Challenging the interpretive tradition established by Ian Watt in the 1950s, I formulate a dynamic model of identity creation based upon the perception of technological membership. Because Watt's focus, as well as those of many succeeding critics, was upon a single genre rather than upon individuals' interaction with new print mediums, the current understanding of eighteenth-century identity is a progressively static model of reading which cannot be applied beyond that specific historical period. My work directly challenges current ideas of subculture formation and the inherent bonds between members by establishing how writers negotiated their own self-perceptions through authorial participation and, ultimately, defined their own social status. By determining how people created their own cultural identities through associations with forms of printed material and evolving technologies, my work reconsiders previous interpretations of literary history based upon economic class formation and prompts re-evaluations of basic critical literary terms, such as 'literature,' 'popular,' and 'aesthetic worth.' With a new model for understanding identity formation in market culture, my research offers models extending beyond the eighteenth century and informing current debates about textual cultures. In recent years, the mass digitization of printed material has prompted announcements of both the death of the book and a decrease in mass literacy; yet, online communication, particularly social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter, has grown dramatically. Computer technology, in this respect, is no more than another phase of printing innovations, which itself is fostering the creation of new reading subcultures.

The widespread opinion is that Northrop Frye’s influence reached its zenith in the 1960s and 1970s, after which point he became obsolete, his work buried in obscurity. This almost universal opinion is summed up in Terry Eagleton’s 1983 rhetorical question, "Who now reads Frye?" In The Reception of Northrop Frye, Robert D. Denham catalogues what has been written about Frye – books, articles, translations, dissertations and theses, and reviews – in order to demonstrate that the attention Frye’s work has received from the beginning has progressed at a geomantic rate. Denham also explores what we can discover once we have a fairly complete record of Frye’s reception in front of us – such as Hayden White’s theory of emplotments applied to historical writing and Byron Almén’s theory of musical narrative. The sheer quantity of what has been written about Frye reveals that the only valid response to Eagleton’s rhetorical question is "a very large and growing number," the growth being not incremental but exponential.

Drawing upon historicist and cultural studies approaches to literature, this book argues that the Romantic construction of the self emerged out of the growth of commercial print culture and the expansion and fragmentation of the reading public beginning in eighteenth-century Britain. Arguing for continuity between eighteenth-century literature and the rise of Romanticism, this groundbreaking book traces the influence of new print market conditions on the development of the Romantic poetic self.

This book explores the ways that authors responded to fundamental questions about literature during an age of accelerating change.

"Ezell's interdisciplinary approach draws together the history of the book and cultural history. The result allows the reader a glimpse of literary life as practiced by "social" authors in the context of the development of commercial publishing and the formalization of copyright laws defining texts and authors."--BOOK JACKET.

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