Description
Book SynopsisLetters played a foundational role in facilitating the rise of print and popularizing new modes of writing in the long eighteenth century. In Writing to the World, Rachael Scarborough King examines the shift from manuscript to print media culture in the long eighteenth century. She introduces the concept of the bridge genre, which enables such change by transferring existing textual conventions to emerging modes of composition and circulation. She draws on this concept to reveal how four crucial genres that emerged during this timethe newspaper, the periodical, the novel, and the biographywere united by their reliance on letters to accustom readers to these new forms of print media. King explains that as newspapers, scientific journals, book reviews, and other new genres began to circulate widely, much of their form and content was borrowed from letters, allowing for easier access to these unfamiliar modes of printing and reading texts. Arguing that bridge genres encouraged people
Trade ReviewThoughtful and engaging . . . valuable for not only for students and scholars of the eighteenth-century British literature but media studies more broadly.
—Adam Sills, Hofstra University,
Modern PhilologyExcellent . . . King's work here has further implications than simply attention to scribal antecedents: in her hands, these developments become a series of case studies in the history of media and technology.
—Emily C. Friedman, Auburn University,
Review of English Studies[King] shows us that letters are almost always both public and private, factual and fictitious, written 'from the heart' and 'to the world.'
—Hazel Wilkinson,
Times Literary SupplementElegantly written and methodically researched,
Writing to the World makes a powerful case for the centrality of epistolarity to the development of eighteenth-century literature. For those interested in genre and form, the book inspires exciting lines of inquiry regarding the period's experiments in literary production. It is an excellent contribution to scholarship in periodical studies and book history and will appeal in particular to readers who seek new, reconceptualized literary histories of the eighteenth century.
—Shang-yu Sheng,
Eighteenth-Century FictionTable of ContentsAcknolwedgements
Introduction
1. Exchanging News
2. Questions and Answers
3. Open Letters
4. ‘A New World’
5. Leaving ‘the World’
Postscript
Bibliographical Essay
Notes
Index
