How To Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain. Leah Price.

Abstract

Leah Price, How To Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton University Press, 2012) 350 + $29.95 In Leah Price's absorbing inquiry, Hoxo To Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain, books out serve a whole range of uses--and not of have much do with reading. Indeed analysis as a whole is prompted by question meanings do books make even, or especially, when they go unread? (2). Exploring this question through a fusion of literary, cultural, and historical methods and book studies, Price opens up fresh avenues of thought about both history of book and history of novel in 19th century. How To Do Things with Books greatly broadens forms and spaces of interaction with printed matter, directing attention a range of different uses and posing new questions. At same time it also repositions 19th century novel, particularly canonical bildungsroman, by recasting both its relationship books and its self-presentation. One or other of these projects would have sufficed make this an important work; both make it a major achievement. Motivating study as a whole is an overriding critique of the primacy of reading itself' in literary and intellectual history: dissolution of book into text that has long flattened out other modalities of interaction with printed books (21). Nor is book history itself, despite its current resurgence as history, immune from pressure of text/book binary; indeed argument outlined in Chapter 1 (nicely titled Reader's Block) takes as a specific target lumping together of history of book and history of reading. Now that 'the history of books and reading' has become a catchphrase, Price observes, two terms have become interchangeable (34). But these two strands of inquiry do not necessarily go hand-in-hand; nor does reading exhaust uses or purposes of books. A primary goal of /low To Do Things with Books is thus recover what has been overwritten by heroic myth--whether Protestant, liberal, New Critical, or New Historicist--that makes textuality source of interiority, authenticity, and selfhood (16). Equally, however, it seeks avoid a lumping that threatens from opposite direction. The cultural turn in intellectual and literary studies, it argues, has produced a poetics of deflation keen relocate ideas and mind in marketplace or body, while trends in book history have tended to reduce book one object among many (22, 34). The strength of How To Do Things with Books lies in agility with which it avoids both idealist and materialist reduction (even as its own adherence is a more culturalist model). Throughout it keeps in view doubleness that distinguishes book both as an object of use and a subject of analysis. In a characteristically witty turn, first chapter un derscores this doubleness by invoking bookish make at once a historical and theoretical point. An old joke, pun literalizing dead book metaphors was recharged in 19th century, as printed proliferated and literacy expanded. Price's entertaining survey (e.g. I lost my Bacont' other day--could anything be harder?/My cook had taken it by stealth--I found it in Larder 27) renders concrete historical import of pun in century as an instrument of social sorting. Formally, however, pun works more abstractly mark the gulf separating bibliographic codes from linguistic codes; in this sense it operates as a corrective the recent strand of book-historical scholarship that set out dovetail them (35). For Price those moments when two strands pull apart but remain in view (35)--the moment of pun--are most productive for analysis, and her own study deftly keeps in simultaneous play operations of reading, handling, and circulating. Marshalling an impressive array of documentation, primarily literary and journalistic (including some visual caricatures), Hoxo To Do Things with Books aims reconstruct nineteenth-century understandings of, and feelings toward, uses of printed matter (5). …