Making the Modern Reader:
Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies
Barbara M. Benedict

Cloth | 1996 | This book is out of print | ISBN13: 978-0-691-02578-0
264 pp. | 6 x 9 | 10 halftones

| Table of Contents
Full text online

Inquiring into the formation of a literary canon during the Restoration and the eighteenth century, Barbara Benedict poses the question, "Do anthologies reflect or shape contemporary literary taste?" She finds that there was a cultural dialectic at work: miscellanies and anthologies transmitted particular tastes while in turn being influenced by the larger culture they helped to create. Benedict reveals how anthologies of the time often created a consensus of literary and aesthetic values by providing a bridge between the tastes of authors, editors, printers, booksellers, and readers.

Making the Modern Reader, the first full treatment of the early modern anthology, is in part a history of the London printing trade as well as of the professionalization of criticism. Benedict thoroughly documents the historical redefinition of the reader: once a member of a communal literary culture, the reader became private and introspective, morally and culturally shaped by choices in reading. She argues that eighteenth-century collections promised the reader that culture could be acquired through the absorption of literary values. This process of cultural education appealed to a middle class seeking to become discriminating consumers of art.

By addressing this neglected genre, Benedict contributes a new perspective on the tension between popular and high culture, between the common reader and the elite. This book will interest scholars working in cultural studies and those studying noncanonical texts as well as eighteenth-century literature in general.

Table of Contents:

	Preface
	Introduction: The Various Feast	3
Ch. 1	Collecting Culture before the Restoration	34
Ch. 2	Reading and Heteroglossia in the Restoration	70
Ch. 3	Discriminating Readers in the Early Eighteenth Century	109
Ch. 4	Reading Systems in the Mid-Eighteenth Century	153
Ch. 5	Reading for Oneself in the Late Eighteenth Century	182
	Conclusion: The Private Possession of Culture	211
	Chronological Listing of Early Anthologies	223
	Bibliography	229
	Index	243

Subject Area:

• British Literature

File created: 4/23/2008

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