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We begin with a sustained look at a key moment in the transformation of British reading practices: the later s. The first decades of the eighteenth century saw a decisive reduction in domestic political tensions compared with those that had gripped the nation for most of the previous century. Certainly not even the most Whiggish of historians would deny the presence of real divisions and resentments in the years leading up to — tensions perhaps best exemplified by the abortive Jacobite uprisings of  and —but these paled in comparison to those surrounding the Popish Plot, the expulsion of James II, and, of course, the Civil Wars themselves. One of the principal consequences of this comparative political stability was that it became possible to imagine oneself as part of a community of readers not always already marked by the legacy of the regicide. This is not to say that the divisions of Whig and Tory or Dissenter and High Church did not still play a significant part in the everyday life of literate Britons after the Hanoverian succession; they certainly did. But they could be imaginatively suspended in a way which had previously seemed impossible, in large part because partisanship itself seemed less of a life-and-death affair than it had been a few decades before. As Steven Zwicker has argued, “the stakes” of political argument had begun to change by the close of the seventeenth century. A sea change took place when the civil wars had to be reconstituted wholly as secondary effect. Dryden knew this . . . as did Pope when he invented a triumphant epic not of empire but of dullness . There is no regretting the astonishing diminutions of The Dunciad; but the apocalypse that Pope imagined was very different from the one that Marvell hoped might suffuse the world and transform time at the close of The First Anniversary. No one was yawning when the angel of the commonweal stirred the healing waters in  or when, at the height of Exclusion, Locke allowed himself to imagine the dissolution of civil society. Dullness is one kind of cultural demise; civil war, quite another.1 With the stakes of partisanship thus reduced—especially after the essentially uncontested accession of George II—it became increasingly possible to envision aesthetics and politics as potentially separable entities and so to recognize Chapter  The Invention of the Fictional Archive some of the limitations and shortcomings of politicized reading, especially the commonplace that even the most seemingly apolitical narrative was best read for its “application” (and likely coded reference) to contemporary politics.2 In this chapter we will examine how the declining attractiveness of application, in conjunction with readers’ increasing ability to imagine themselves part of a virtual community not inevitably divided against itself, created an opening for a new reading practice—imaginative expansion—which could seize upon the same liminal features of a text as reading à clef had done, but turn them into an opportunity for communal play, rather than partisan strife. That is, we will investigate how hitherto politicized readers transformed what Catherine Gallagher has termed their “desire to open every book to some extra-textual reality” into a means of imagining those books as but installments from a larger fictional reality: what I would like to term “the fictional archive.”3 By tracing this shift in the desirability of different reading practices, we can account for the otherwise deeply puzzling phenomenon with which my story begins: the unprecedented proliferation of afterlives for Lemuel Gulliver, which began in late  and was followed, less than two years later, with a similar explosion of off-page adventures for Captain Macheath and Polly Peachum. This chapter, then, details the origins and first efflorescence of imaginative expansion in eighteenth-century Britain. Subsequent chapters will explore its varieties, consequences, and ultimate transformation over the course of the next hundred years.4 * * * One of the most striking aspects of the decreasing appeal of application in the first decades of the eighteenth century was the proliferation of attempts to theorize the place of topicality within the text itself. By “topicality” I mean not only specific extratextual referents for particular characters—the figures for whom a “key” would be supplied—but also what Leah Marcus has termed “localization”: the “fierce desire for decoding more generally.”5 As with many other cultural phenomena, these self-conscious efforts to pin down what had previously gone without saying indicate something of “a crisis in faith” regarding the utility of application.6 What strikes me as...

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