British Romanticism and the Survival of Manuscript Culture
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The Interacting with Print Research Group presents:
鈥�British Romanticism and the Survival of Manuscript Culture :
A seminar with Prof. Michelle Levy (Simon Fraser)鈥�
Friday, April 3, 2009
2:00-4:00 pm
Colgate Seminar Room, Rare Books and Special Collections, McLennan Library
缅北强奸
Preparatory Readings Available Online at
Kindly RSVP to Lauren Welsh at interacting.arts [at] mcgill.ca
The aim of this seminar is to dispel the assumption that the
late-eighteenth century print avalanche destroyed and supplanted
earlier forms of literary dissemination, specifically that of
manuscript culture. By rejecting what Paul Duguid has described as
the "rhetoric of supercession," whereby "each new technological
type vanquishes or subsumes its predecessors," the research
presented will demonstrate the survival of traditional manuscript
practices beyond the early eighteenth century, in which current
scholarship would have them end. Manuscript culture, it will be
argued, was not only increasingly absorbed into the late
eighteenth-century print marketplace but also enjoyed a revival in
its own right.听
This seminar will introduce my new research project, which offers a
large-scale reassessment of the relation between scribal and print
culture, one begun by scholars of earlier eras of manuscript
culture, including Harold Love and Margaret Ezell. Drawing upon
work by media scholars such as Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, we
will examine how the late eighteenth-century print boom remediated
script, and, at the same time, gave new life to scribal practices
that could stand apart from the publicity of print. Attention will
also be paid to the advantages and drawbacks of using digital
technology to remediate historical manuscripts.听
In this seminar, we will address the practical and theoretical
questions that attend our attempts to reimagine the Romantic period
as one in which scribal, oral and print cultures interpenetrated.
The readings focus on the negotiations between script and print as
manifested in the selected writings and practices of two of the
period's canonical authors: Jane Austen and S. T. Coleridge.
Through discussion of their work as well as that of a diverse set
of other well-known figures including Anna Barbauld, Lord Byron,
and Dorothy Wordsworth, this seminar will examine how the endurance
of manuscript culture shaped emergent understandings of print,
authorship and literature. At the same time, we will consider how
assumptions about the hegemony of print pose challenges to this
reevaluation of manuscript culture.
