This collection provides students and researchers with a new and lively understanding of the role of institutions in the production, reception, and meaning of literature in the period 1700–1900. The period saw a fundamental transition from a patronage system to a marketplace in which institutions played an important mediating role between writers and readers, a shift with consequences that continue to resonate today. Often producers themselves, institutions processed and claimed authority over a variety of cultural domains that never simply tessellated into any unified system. The collection's primary concerns are British and imperial environments, with a comparative German case study, but it offers encouragement for its approaches to be taken up in a variety of other cultural contexts. From the Post Office to museums, from bricks and mortar to less tangible institutions like authorship and genre, this collection opens up a new field for literary studies.
This collection provides a lively understanding of the roles institutions play in the production and reception of literature, arguing against the assumption that the institutional and the literary are necessarily at odds and demonstrating the particular importance of the period 1700–1900 to the development of the modern institutional landscape.
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'This monograph is an exemplary work of scholarship.' James Najarian, European Romantic Review
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This lively collection makes a compelling case for the importance of institutions in the production, reception, and meaning of literature.
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vii | |
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ix | |
| Acknowledgements |
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xiv | |
| Introduction: Literature and Institutions |
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1 | (23) |
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1 Knowledge Exchange in the Seventeenth Century: From the Third University to the Royal Society |
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24 | (20) |
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2 `Supporting Mutual Benevolence': Libraries, Civic Benefaction, and the Spalding Gentlemen's Society, 1709--1755 |
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44 | (21) |
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3 Institutions without Addresses |
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65 | (18) |
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4 Eighteenth-Century Musenhof Courts as Bridges and Brokers for Cultural Networks and Social Reform |
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83 | (18) |
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5 Becoming Institutional: The Case of the Anacreontic Society |
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101 | (19) |
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6 Circulating Libraries as Institutional Creators of Genres |
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120 | (15) |
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7 Lecturing Networks and Cultural Institutions, 1740--1830 |
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135 | (22) |
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8 Catalogues as Instituting Genres of the Nineteenth-Century Museum: The Two Hunterians |
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157 | (21) |
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9 Charles Lamb and the British Museum as an Institution of Literature |
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178 | (18) |
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10 A Disruptive and Dangerous Education and the Wealth of the Nation: The Early Mechanics' Institutes |
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196 | (19) |
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11 `The Ladies' Contribution': Women and the Mechanics' Institute on the Goldfields of Victoria |
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215 | (19) |
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12 `[ L]etters Must Increase': Reading and Writing the Post Office as a Literary Institution |
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234 | (21) |
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13 Networks, Nodes, and Beacons: Cultural Institutions in Nineteenth-Century Southeast Asia |
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255 | (20) |
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275 | (17) |
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| Index |
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292 | |
Jon Mee is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of York. His books include Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community 1762-1830 (2011), and Print, Publicity, and Popular Radicalism in the 1790s (2016). He is currently completing a book on cultural networks in the industrial revolution for which he held a British Academy-Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship, 202021. Matthew Sangster is Senior Lecturer in Romantic Studies, Fantasy and Cultural History at the University of Glasgow, and the author of Living as an Author in the Romantic Period (2021). He is co-investigator on two AHRC projects on historical library borrowings and has served on the Executive of the British Association for Romantic Studies for twelve years.
