The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain 1700-1830 (review)

Reviews Clifford Siskin. The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain 1700-1830. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. x+285pp. ISBN 0-8018-5696-5. Historicism is always difficult. Ten years ago, in The Historicity of Romantic Discourse, Clifford Siskin set out to write "a new literary history" (p. 3) of romanticism that did not perpetuate romantic notions about literature. Previous scholars, he believed, had uncritically followed the romantics in assuming that literature was an activity involving "development," an assumption that accorded with the romantic view of the self "as a mind that grows" (p. 3). The romantics, Siskin argued, put in place a mythology of development: they psychologized certain formal effects within writing as the expression of the author's developing imagination, recognized certain genres as the special discursive space ofliterature where the imagination could be developed, and recast the story of literature as a narrative of rise and development. Siskin, however, had not given himself an easy task. To write about romanticism without being romantic required that he produce a history that did not itself present a narrative of development. His solution was to experiment with a kind of episodic critical historicism, one that uncovered the prevalence of romantic thinking across a range of genres and periods while at the same time demonstrating how romanticism's moment was "culture-specific" (p. 3). Siskin's solution worked brilliantly: The Historicity ofRomantic Discourse is one of the most sophisticated critiques of romantic ideology to have appeared in our time. His new book, The Work of Writing, is an elaboration of his earlier argument. Once again, Siskin is concerned with the conceptual shift that, during the later eighteenth century, brought about a redefinition ofliterature's function. He returns to several ofthe same topics and episodes ofthe earlier book: the valuing ofmental EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 11, Number 3, April 1999 360 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 11:3 labour in The Prelude, Austen's place within romanticism and the domestication of the novel, and the delimitation of the category of literature. But, whereas the previous book was concerned largely with the mythology ofdevelopment internal to romantic discourse, The Work of Writing is more outward looking, in two respects. First, its chronological scope, as its subtitle indicates, is wider: Siskin looks back to the early eighteenth century to describe the historical conditions that eventually precipitated the change in thinking about literature. Second, it is more directly concerned with the cause of the change, which Siskin locates in writing itself. By its Dunciad-likc proliferation, writing had come, by the early eighteenth century, to seem an impediment to intellectual change. To bring it under "control for the sake of growth" (p. 20), as Siskin puts it, writing was submitted to a division of labour. In a way analogous to what occurred generally within the British economy, the "work" of writing was broken out into different disciplines, specializations, and professional orders. Disciplinarity made writing both governable and productive by rendering it "narrow but deep" (p. 20): within a discipline, the range ofinquiry was restricted in order, it was supposed, to ensure a deeper understanding of a given subject. Siskin's principal argumenthas to do with literature's role within this narrowing. Literature, he suggests, was itself transformed into a discipline. Not only was it specialized as an aesthetic discourse, but it was presented as a job for experts: The Prelude, Siskin observes, is at once a "résumé" of the training required to become a poet, and a source of professional mystique for both Wordsworth and later editors, since the poem's incompleteness forever justifies their specialized efforts at "improving" it (pp. 112-13). More important, literature contributed to the naturalizing of disciplinarity. In a series of provocative chapters, Siskin explores how literary discourse made work seem desirable, no longer something to be avoided by gentlemen but rather an integral part of one's identity; how it helped to obscure divisions of gender implicit within the hierarchizing ofcertain kinds of knowledge as "useful"; how it displaced philosophy as the essential discipline that could serve as a prerequisite both for entering the professions and for belonging to a national community; and how the advent...