Synopses & Reviews
The decade after 1815 was a period of cultural instability, in which literature was redefined in response to a mass readership. Magazines were a product of and response to a culture that was metropolitan in size and heterogeneity. This book analyses a literary genre that made creative use of a cultural confusion which elsewhere provoked anxiety.
Synopsis
In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were tempted to take a bite out of an apple that promised them the "knowledge of good and evil." Today, a shiny apple with a bite out of it is the symbol of Apple Computers. The age of the Internet has speeded up human knowledge, and it also provides even more temptation to know more than may be good for us. Americans have been right at the forefront of the digital revolution, and we have felt its unsettling effects in both our religions and our politics. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite argues that we long to return to the innocence of the Garden of Eden and not be faced with countless digital choices. But returning to the innocence of Eden is dangerous in this modern age and, instead, we can become wiser about the wired world.
About the Author
DAVID STEWART Lecturer in English Literature in the Department of Humanities at the University of Northumbria, UK. He has published a number of articles on Romanticism and print culture in journals such as Romanticism, Prose Studies, Keats-Shelley Journal &Studies in English Literature 1500-1900.
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: The Age of the Magazine
Urban, Hunt, North: Personality and the Principle of Miscellaneity
Fighting Style in the Magazine Market
Reading Magazines with a Cockney's Eye
'Distant Correspondents': Readers, Personalities and Elegy
'Our own emolument': Commerce and the Category of Literature
Coda
Notes
Bibliography
Index