Jon Mee and Matthew Sangster (eds). Institutions of Literature, 1700–1900: The Development of Literary Culture and Production

Abstract

Institutions of Literature updates historical accounts of institutions (societies, libraries, and museums) by tracing their influence on literary culture and production before and after the Romantic period. In their introduction, Mee and Sangster address how literary criticism too often conflates small, ramshackle institutions with leviathan-like bureaucracies. For instance, early eighteenth-century institutions like the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society, an antiquarian foundation where members first met at a local coffee house, are hardly the kind of Foucauldian monster that comes to mind for suspicious literary scholars. Yet, the volume wrestles with a simple fact: literary studies are uncomfortable with institutional authority. For good reason, the editors see it as no coincidence that Institutions of Literature ‘appears at a time when academics are feeling increasingly alienated by institutional forms’ (p. 3). However, writers and academics remain active participants in the same institutional structures they resist. This conflict dates back to early institutions. As Anne H. Stevens’s chapter on circulating libraries argues, ‘Institutions shape the long history of the novel’, a genre first condemned as immoral and harmful to women readers (p. 127). Furthermore, Romantic notions of literary freedom and authenticity beyond institutional confines seem in tension with the lives of writers like Coleridge and Hazlitt who were star lecturers at institutions throughout the 1810s (p. 19). Mee and Sangster’s study scrutinises webs of literary production and dissemination—in Britain, the British Empire, and elsewhere in Europe—that make institutions and literature inextricably linked.