Writing Print Cultures Past: Literary Criticism and Book History

Book historians focus on the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as a period of transformation in authorship and reading practices in England. Their studies often turn to paratextual matter like prefaces and dedications for evidence about how authors, patrons, publishers, and readers negotiated their roles in the changing literary marketplace. Early literary criticism found expression in the same paratexts. Yet although they share common artifacts, these two lines of inquiry remain largely separate. In this article, I bring these threads of inquiry together to show how the history of literary criticism contributes to the history of the book (and vice versa).