04703nam 2200757 a 450 991046388220332120211005023735.01-283-89700-80-8122-0521-910.9783/9780812205213(CKB)3240000000065365(OCoLC)822017886(CaPaEBR)ebrary10642676(SSID)ssj0000631126(PQKBManifestationID)11420405(PQKBTitleCode)TC0000631126(PQKBWorkID)10591902(PQKB)10592679(MiAaPQ)EBC3441924(OCoLC)793012721(MdBmJHUP)muse17962(DE-B1597)449488(OCoLC)979740937(DE-B1597)9780812205213(Au-PeEL)EBL3441924(CaPaEBR)ebr10642676(CaONFJC)MIL420950(EXLCZ)99324000000006536520110606d2012 uy 0engurcn|||||||||txtccrKnowing books[electronic resource] the consciousness of mediation in eighteenth-century Britain /Christina Lupton1st ed.Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Pressc20121 online resource (199 p.)Material TextsBibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph0-8122-4238-6 0-8122-4372-2 Includes bibliographical references and index.Front matter --Contents --Prologue --Introduction. Giving Power to the Medium --Chapter 1. Powerlessness as Entertainment --Chapter 2. What It-Narratives Know About Their Authors --Chapter 3. The Theory of Paper --Chapter 4. Sermons Written on the Screen of Print --Chapter 5. Gray and Mackenzie Printing on the Wall --Notes --Bibliography --Index --AcknowledgmentsThe eighteenth century has long been associated with realism and objective description, modes of representation that deemphasize writing. But in the middle decades of the century, Christina Lupton observes, authors described with surprising candor the material and economic facets of their own texts' production. In Knowing Books Lupton examines a variety of eighteenth-century sources, including sermons, graffiti, philosophical texts, and magazines, which illustrate the range and character of mid-century experiments with words announcing their status as physical objects. Books that "know" their own presence on the page and in the reader's hand become, in Lupton's account, tantalizing objects whose entertainment value competes with that of realist narrative.Knowing Books introduces these mid-eighteenth-century works as part of a long history of self-conscious texts being greeted as fashionable objects. Poststructuralist and Marxist approaches to literature celebrate the consciousness of writing and economic production as belonging to revolutionary understandings of the world, but authors of the period under Lupton's gaze expose the facts of mediation without being revolutionary. On the contrary, their explication of economic and material processes shores up their claim to material autonomy and economic success. Lupton uses media theory and close reading to suggest the desire of eighteenth-century readers to attribute sentience to technologies and objects that entertain them. Rather than a historical study of print technology, Knowing Books offers a humanist interpretation of the will to cede agency to media. This horizon of theoretical engagement makes Knowing Books at once an account of the least studied decades of the eighteenth century and a work of relevance for those interested in new attitudes toward media in the twenty-first.Material texts.English literature18th centuryHistory and criticismTheory, etcMediation in literatureSelf-consciousness (Awareness) in literatureLiterature publishingGreat BritainHistory18th centuryBooks and readingGreat BritainHistory18th centuryElectronic books.English literatureHistory and criticismTheory, etc.Mediation in literature.Self-consciousness (Awareness) in literature.Literature publishingHistoryBooks and readingHistory820.9/005Lupton Christina1033393MiAaPQMiAaPQMiAaPQBOOK9910463882203321Knowing books2451910UNINA