The Appearance of Print in Eighteenth-Century Fiction by Christopher Flint, and: Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Christina Lupton (review)

The title puns of The Appearance of Print and Knowing Books refer to the elusive Eldorado of book history and print culture studies: demonstration of how the material form of the printed book shaped the practices of authorship and reading, as well as the socioeconomic fields and cultural institutions in which these practices take their part. In its most well-known formulation: to what extent is the medium the message? While it has become generally accepted that something definitive occurred in eighteenth-century Britain—that the nation's media ecology finally tipped, roughly two centuries after the arrival of movable type, irrevocably towards print dominance—it has been more difficult to determine exactly how writers and readers changed their thinking and interactions as a result of an existence that was in every dimension increasingly mediated by print. In the tradition of critics such as Janine Barchas, Deidre Lynch, Tom Keymer, and Clifford Siskin, who have brought graphic phenomena together with shifting ideas about the origin of texts, the acts of reading and writing, and the recognition and negotiation of modernity, Christopher Flint in The Appearance of Print and Christina Lupton in Knowing Books set themselves the task of identifying the link between the printed page and forms of consciousness. At the same time, they align with most recent work in explicitly eschewing technological determinism: their interest, in Lupton's words, is in "the human, rather than the technological, force behind texts displaying consciousness of their own production and circulation" (10).

Like the first three forebears mentioned above, both studies devote much of their attention to novels at the time when that genre was attaining the forefront of popular awareness within an entrenched culture of print and was becoming one of the most thoroughly commodified of print forms, though not the most common. However, in keeping with their shared emphasis on the reflexive nature of fiction, their interest is not in a realist effect that renders the medium invisible, but in what Flint sees as "the seeming paradox that a genre supposedly invented to make mundane reality transparent, visibly recorded the self-conscious manipulation of its typographical nature" (1), and what Lupton describes as "fiction [that] was produced through, and productive of, participant awareness—of genre, of epistemology, and even of print" (2). Flint's category of fiction expands beyond the novel to include such works as Charles Gildon's loosely organized collection of fictional letters beginning with The Post-Boy Robb'd of His Mail (1692); lends equal weight to the continuously canonical, such as Jonathan Swift's The Tale of a Tub, and the more locally influential Thomas Amory's Life of John Buncle, Esq. (1756); and extends chronologically from Gildon to Jane Austen. Lupton's more restricted time-frame, the 1750s, '60s, and '70s, nevertheless encompasses an even broader generic range, including chapters on philosophical writing (Hume and Beattie), printed sermons, and writing in various sentimental genres that represent print as inscriptive, fragmentary, and unsympathetic to human designs. Both rightly consider the hack and her or his productions as fertile grounds for an examination of instrumental publication, as work "that points with remarkable candor to the actual conditions and materials of [its] writing" (Lupton, 4).

The two approaches can be illustrated by their parallel chapters on "it-narratives," those tales told by inanimate narrators such as coins, quill pens, coats, and hackney coaches, which achieved their height of popularity in the 1750s to 1770s. For Flint, the descriptively titled "Inanimate Fiction: Circulating Stories in Object Narratives" offers an opportunity to explore representations of "an implicit theory of culture in which literary dissemination and economic exchange appear...