Loving Literature: A Cultural History by Deidre Shauna Lynch (review)

There are certain critical stories that scholars of eighteenth-century literature must tell again and again. Like the “rise of the novel” or the “emergence of the public sphere,” the story of the origins of English literature—as a canon, a mode, a discipline, a profession— is too important to narrate only once. Following in the footsteps of John Guillory’s trailblazing Cultural Capital (1993), the eighteenth-century history of “English literature” as a discourse has been the topic of monographs by Simon Jarvis, Jonathan Kramnick, Trevor Ross, Mary Poovey, and many others. Among the seductions of these studies is the way they function both as metonymies and metaphors of our contemporary critical moment, at once prehistories of how we got here and period-costume allegories of our own debates and concerns.

Deidre Lynch’s Loving Literature: A Cultural History makes a major contribution to this tradition. Lynch’s guiding argument is both original and elegantly simple: at the same historical period (c. 1750–1850) that “English literature” comes to name a certain kind of text, a certain kind of study, and a certain kind of academic profession, it also comes to entail a certain kind of emotional relationship between readers and their books. It was no longer enough merely to admire literature, as earlier critics in the tradition of Joseph Addison had done; in the period Lynch examines, nothing but love would do. For today’s teachers and professors, English is “a line of work” whose practitioners “are also called upon to love literature and to ensure that others do so” (1, emphasis in original). We turn our pleasure reading into articles and our bedtime stories into class discussions. Lynch demonstrates that it has been thus from the beginning—and, moreover, that the tension between literature as an edifying profession and literature as the object of love was every bit as fraught for Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Anna Seward, Thomas Warton, Thomas de Quincey, and others as it is for us.

Though Lynch’s central thesis lends itself to ready summary, the course of her argument is nuanced, subtle, and richly textured by engagement with both recent scholarship and the material archive of the Romantic era. Her opening chapter retells the debate between Seward and Boswell over the critical legacy of Johnson as a debate about the appropriate emotional stance between reader and text. Her second chapter, on Warton, explains how the very literary scholars who reconceived the English canon as something past, different, and other, simultaneously described that canon as waiting to be discovered and loved by each new generation of poets and readers. Patient archival research and historical explication are thus not opposed to literary love but rather its prerequisite. This chapter is a tour de force—the one I loved the most—because (with apologies to Pope on Longinus) it is itself the great historicism it draws. Warton and his friend Richard Hurd imagined Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton as romantic men of letters like themselves, escaping into the past in order to create poetry. Without quite explicitly saying so, Lynch imagines Warton and Hurd as academics like us, escaping into our reading rooms and carrels (she makes much of Warton’s voracious use of the Bodleian) in order to write books like Loving Literature.

A third chapter examines the “bibliomania” of the early eighteenth century, when book collectors paid unprecedented prices for First Folios and ballad collections alike, and essayists such as Leigh Hunt rhapsodized about the pleasures of old books, in the interest, Lynch argues, of appropriating the public canon for private pleasure. In chapter four, Lynch describes how reading (and, particularly, rereading) allowed novels to function like beloved family members. For nineteenth-century Janeites, literature was an object of domestic, habitual love, modeled on the felicitous companionate marriage that the reader may imagine to follow the denouement (or rather, nouement) of an Austen courtship plot. Two final chapters turn from possessive love and domestic love...