| Moveable Type is a study of literature's role in the extensive transformation of print communication that occurred in Western culture during the first half of the nineteenth century. Focusing on the years 1790 to 1830, the dissertation explores how literary texts participated in readers' adaptation to the accelerating mobility and reproducibility of writing initiated around the turn of the nineteenth century. Through discussions of particular book formats that became increasingly prominent to classify this surplus and circulation of writing (critical editions, translations, collected editions and miscellanies), the dissertation examines how literary works by early-nineteenth-century writers such as Walter Scott, J. W. Goethe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Sophie Mereau, Clemens Brentano and Washington Irving functioned as guides to, but also interrogations of, the nature of this increasingly bookish world. How did these early-nineteenth-century European and American writers repeatedly return to what it meant to base a culture around the reading, writing, and buying of an ever greater number of books? How did their texts imaginatively address the growing appropriatibility, shareability, collectivity and repetitiveness of writing that characterized the emerging conditions of print communication? How did literature come to assume, in other words, a crucial role in thinking about media and mediation in modern life? In relocating the act of reading within a social matrix of material circulation, Moveable Type aims to highlight the importance of bibliographical details for literary study as well as the role that formerly marginal characters (editors, translators, collectors, publishers, judges and censors) played in shaping the meaning of literary texts. |
