Abstract
More than once in the Lives of the English Poets Samuel Johnson depicts the writers whom he is anthologizing as readers. In a manner more rueful than celebratory, Johnson will trace the man’s pursuit of poetic fame to the moment when the boy was captivated by illusions: among them, the anthropomorphic illusions that readers cultivate when we construe our encounters with the surfaces of representation as experiences in which we sustain the company of people.
I hate to read new books. There are twenty or thirty volumes that I have read over and over again, and these are the only ones that I have any desire ever to read at all.
—William Hazlitt
[T]he clock, not the steam-engine, is the key machine of the modern industrial age.
—Lewis Mumford
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Notes
Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 30;
cf. Frank Kermode, ‘Institutional Control of Interpretation’, Salmagundi 43 (1979), 72–86.
I receive assistance here from William Paulson, ‘The Literary Canon in the Age of Its Technical Obsolescence’, in Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology, ed. Joseph Tabbi and Michael Wutz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 240–1.
Re-reading is struggle and suffering in François Roustang’s ‘On Reading Again’, in The Limits of Theory, ed. Thomas M. Kavanagh (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 121–38;
see also Matei Calinescu, Rereading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993);
Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), pp. 15–16.
See Kirstie Blair, ‘John Keble and the Rhythm of Faith’, Essays in Criticism 53, 2 (2003), 129–50;
Ruskin, ‘Fiction, Fair and Foul’ (1880), The Complete Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen and New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902), vol. 34, p. 349; John Clare by Himself, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Ashington, Northumberland and Manchester: Mid Northumberland Arts Group and Carcanet Press, 1996 ), p. 56;
E.F.G. [Edward Fitzgerald], ‘Memoir of Bernard Barton’, in The Poems and Letters of Bernard Barton, Edited by his Daughter (London: Hall, Virtue, and Co., 1849), p. xxxiv. Barton likewise knew by heart ‘all of the good things’ in Boswell’s Life of Johnson and would ‘sit at table, his snuff-box in his hand, … repeating some favourite passage, and glancing his fine brown eyes about him as he recited’.
Quoted in Dino Felluga, The Perversity of Poetry: Romantic Ideology and the Popular Male Poet of Genius (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005), p. 41.
J. E. Austen-Leigh, A Memoir ofJane Austen, and Other Family Recollections, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002 ), p. 112.
Anne Thackeray Ritchie, A Book of Sibyls (London: Smith, Elder, 1883), p. 201; this reprints a series of Cornhill Magazine essays from 1871.
Franco Moretti, ‘Serious Century’, in The Novel, vol. 1, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 400.
Anna Laetitia Barbauld, ed., The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson (London: Phillips, 1804), vol. 4, p. 264.
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. John Davie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 203.
Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction (New York: Scribner, 1925), p. 128.
Adolphus Jack, Essays on the Novel: As Illustrated by Scott and Miss Austen (London: Macmillan, 1897), p. 257.
Thomas De Quincey, ‘Walladmor: Walter Scott’s German Novel’, in The Works of Thomas De Quincey, vol. 4, ed. Frederick Burwick (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000), p. 236.
B. C. Southam, Introduction, Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, vol. 2 (1870–1940) (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 13.
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© 2009 Deidre Lynch
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Lynch, D. (2009). Canons’ Clockwork: Novels for Everyday Use. In: Ferris, I., Keen, P. (eds) Bookish Histories. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230244801_5
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