Configuring Romanticism and Print History: A Retrospect

Abstract

This essay returns to a moment of convergence in Romantic studies, before the rise of “history of the book” or reading history, when provocative theoretical, historical, and literary debates in this field posed new questions about writers, publics, and print media. I go back briefly to the genesis of my own project on the formation of reading publics at the turn of the nineteenth century and some of the institutional contexts that shaped The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832. Following a few second thoughts on the project, I then turn to more recent questions facing scholars working on the historicity of reading and print culture. What is entailed by a “history of reading”? Where do historians and literary/cultural critics, for all they may share in this enterprise, part company on some important matters in reading and book history? And where does the case-study or microcosmic approach to these questions need to join with a more generous and complex systematic approach to reading and print media in history? In partial answer to these queries, I end by pointing to some of the most important emergent work on how we need to think about new media in relation to those historical works and media forms known to the past as “literary.”