The Manufacturers of Literature: Writing and the Literary Marketplace in Eighteenth-Century England (review)

REVIEWS319 GeorgeJustice. TheManufacturers ofLiterature: Writingand theLiterary Marketplace in Eighteenth-Century England. Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2002. 281pp. US$46.50. ISBN: 0-87413-750-0. This book focuses on the material contexts of literary production in eighteenth-century England. Its central claim is that "Literature" became a culturally sanctioned and institutionalized force that participated widely in a "synchronic public sphere" fostered by developments in print technology (p. 14). Literary works managed this transformation, GeorgeJustice claims, by inhabiting a "counter public sphere" that was separate from the "world" while still seeking to influence it (p. 97). The chief strength of the analysis is its broad synthetic approach to the particular material conditions of literary manufacture in the eighteenth century. The chapters provide "case studies" (p. 15) ofAddison and Steele's Spectator, Pope's Epistle to Arbuthnot and Johnson's Life of Savage, Dodsley's Collection ofPoems by Several Hands, Brooke's The Excursion, and Burney's Evelina and Camilla. Each case study explores the varied and complex ways in which literature and die marketplace intersect. Sprightly and intellectually flexible, The Manufacturers of Literature serves as a useful entrance into a currendy busy field sometimes called "The History of the Book." Justice demonstrates a comprehensive and informed familiarity with eighteenth-century English literature generally and publishing culture specifically. Particularly useful and refreshing is his insistence throughout much of the book on tracking "individual agents" who are often engaged in conflicting and conflicted publishing activities. Discussing Roger de Coverly, for instance,Justice argues that Addison and Steele's celebrated persona in the Spectatorfunctions as both a counter to and ajustification of the Spectator 's gendemanly disinterest. The de Coverly persona challenges elements of the Spectator's disinterestedness, but, in other respects, validates the Spectator's epistemology. He illustrates the "tension between the immediate and the permanent, the Spectator as commodity and die Spectator as Literature " (p. 62). The periodic use of this ideological persona reflects, in turn, Addison's "oblique" endorsement of the literary marketplace, and his responsiveness to ongoing consumer demands through serial publication (p. 55). At times, Justice's facility with the broad history of publishing interferes with more historically precise assessments of print culture. One of the pleasures of this text—its asides on how the fate of the printed page in our digital culture relates to the concerns of individual aspirants to the print culture ofthe eighteenth-century—is also a drawback, asJustice is occasionally prone to breezy correlations between vasdy different historical contexts. 320 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION16:2 This tendency to level finer distinctions is perhaps the greatest weakness of the book. In two of his three central categories, the "Public Sphere" and "Literature" (the third is die "Literary Marketplace"),Justice leans towards monolidiic definition. While he usefully asserts that the public sphere must be understood as an "idea" that "lay behind the practices of eighteenthcentury writers" rather than an existing historical force (p. 19), his insistence on the idea of a singular public sphere (rather than multiple spheres) and his dependence on the distinction between it and a counter public sphere weakens the impact of his emphasis on complexity within the literary marketplace. An extensive commentary now exists on Habermas's conceptualization of the public sphere, andJustice's book would benefit from a more nuanced examination of diis category. In confronting the status of literature in a print economy,Justice attends in detail to the material practices of individual and varied agents, from Addison, Steele, and Dodsley to Pope, Bumey, and Brookes, all to excellent effect. But because one of his most important observations is that "Literature " in this period constituted a counter public sphere, his detailed focus militates against an adequate representation of something that broad. It seems rather schematic and compartmentalizing to construct "Literature "—or, even more particularly, the "Novel"—as wholly constituting a single counter public sphere (pp. 15, 147). An approach that emphasizes individual agency in the print marketplace might more productively construe literature as the range of products of a loose body of actors (authors, publishers, printers, readers, reviewers, etc.) who are themselves at various points active in both public and counter public spheres. HadJustice featured...