Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (review)

We have spent over two hundred years living in and through books, and the ways in which we have done so were essentially the invention of a short span of time straddling the turn of the nineteenth century. Such is the central thesis of Andrew Piper’s Dreaming in Books. And Piper adds another, perhaps more surprising guiding thesis: at what seems to many observers—though not to Piper, to be sure—the twilight of the book era, many of the concepts used to describe what is supposedly new about communication in the internet age map quite snugly onto the forms of communication that were established by, and in turn helped establish, the dominance of the book in the late eighteenth century.

Piper, surprisingly sanguine about the future of the book, argues that not only have we not left the book behind; instead the very terms we turn to mourn or celebrate the book’s demise actually hearken from the world of the book itself. As a result, Piper tells the story of the book “not as a narrative of rise and fall, but . . . as a series of social, historical, and technological negotiations” (236). This is a set of exciting and ambitious claims, and Piper’s rather detailed case studies don’t entirely manage to vindicate these claims with quite as much force as staked out by his introduction. But Piper is breaking new ground here, and he seems quite content to forge ahead and beckon others to follow—and, given this erudite, lucid, and altogether thrilling book, I am quite confident that they will.

Each individual chapter deals with a different way of putting together texts, or texts and images, between two covers. The first of these chapters deals with the fractious and fragmented editorial history of Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre. Piper starts out from the simple suggestion that, given the incredibly convoluted genesis of the book we purchase under that title today, it might make more sense to speak of a “network” of interrelated and interacting texts rather than relying on a teleological model by which the earlier texts are simply fragments striving for the final fulfillment of their destiny between the covers of a physical book. Piper’s second chapter deals with the tantalizing and terrifying role the copy plays in fiction around the turn of the nineteenth century. Piper connects E. T. A. Hoffmann’s practice of republication and collection with his deployment of uncanny returns and doppelgängers. The third and fourth chapters deal with two other kinds of books that contained multitudes—namely editions and almanacs.

The importance of translation in constituting the pan-European romantic movement has received much scholarly attention recently, as has the crucial role women played in romantic translation practice. In picking up on these discussions, Piper once again grounds the phenomenon in the material world of physical books, drawing our attention to “the commercialism of women’s writing.” It was through translating that women writers became professionalized, Piper argues, and it was translating and publishing translations that allowed them to negotiate problems of originality, subjectivity, and publicity. Piper begins his fifth chapter with a writer who did not just practice translation, but rather lived in translation—Elisabeth Kulmann grew up in St. Petersburg and wrote most of her poetic work in three languages at once, without any of them ever being the primary or original one. He then backtracks to survey a number of women translators and their practice, from Sophie Mereau-Brentano’s translation of La Princesse de Clèves, via Hedwig Hülle’s translations of Homer, to Dorothea Tieck.

Chapter six turns to the illustrated books of the romantic age. Here Piper is most interested in the intertextual and interpictorial references that abound in the early nineteenth-century explosion of illustrated books, books of illustrations, or books about illustrations. Piper deftly navigates the proliferation of engravings, Schattenrisse, or Umrisse, drawings (such as those of...