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Reviewed by:
  • Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Christina Lupton
  • Melvyn New
Christina Lupton. Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania, 2012. Pp. xi + 184. $55.

It is difficult to escape the first twentyfive pages of this study, because they raise so many important questions about the work of many eighteenth-century scholars since the turn of the century. Thus, for example, when Ms. Lupton asserts in her first paragraph that literature that “reflects critically on the economic and material production” of itself is the “most typical kind of mid-century writing of all,” we immediately wonder how this datum was arrived at. True, some writers do seem conscious of the fact that the Critical and Monthly reviewers stood ready to slash their works to [End Page 47] pieces, and so tried to disarm bad reviews with self-denigration. Does this differ, however, from writers of prefaces in Dryden’s day telling us they wrote at their leisure and published only at the insistence of friends? Are these not also tropes that reflect on the “economic and material production of literature,” as, indeed, does every dedication written, say, between Dryden’s generation and Pope’s?

Ms. Lupton wants to tie this early observation to the ongoing and overcrowded, not to say trendy, discourse about materiality or “thing theory,” which, she observes, replaced the no longer trendy discourse about deconstruction. Both approaches share a desire to downplay (or ignore) the role of consciousness (or genius) in the production of literature. To her credit, she worries, as indeed she should, that these approaches “come across as being the result of our theoretical orientation. The history we recover appears only coincidentally recorded in texts themselves, and not as a phenomenon that was apparent to the writers and readers caught up in its development.” Unfortunately, she is never quite able to dispel this suspicion, despite her attempt to find some distance between herself and materialist readings by means of “mediation theory”—which seems to enable her to embrace two aspects of the books under study rejected by her earlier compatriots: the words on the page and the authorial consciousness that put them there. Thus, she opines, in words that sound familiar enough to a reader of Wimsatt and Warren: “We need to continue to read closely and describe texts that cultivate discursively the impression of understanding their own mediation.” Indeed, her revolution does seem a U-turn: “this book contributes indirectly to the argument that people do in fact control the technologies they use”; and “with close reading … the ability of print to overtake thought can be reclaimed as belonging to the realm of willful human construction and imagination.”

The proof of the pudding is in the taste, but that takes us back to Ms. Lupton’s pudding, a collection of selected sentences from several minor authors of the period; to be sure minor (or taste, for that matter) is a term not used in materialist vocabularies, so it is our responsibility, if we are to weigh this book fairly, to have read Charlotte Summers, The Temple Beau, The Anti-Gallican, The Adventures of Captain Greenland, Lydia, and a dozen more longforgotten titles. Short of that, we may quibble by asking, first, how many books of this sort Ms. Lupton read that did not contain the sort of narrative voice she was looking for; and second, how central to the actual book are the quotations provided—that is, are they a sentence or two where a narrator surfaces within an ocean of text interested in other subjects, or are they actually representative of the fiction as a whole? Surely some of her reading failed to produce evidence for her thesis. What were the titles of those forgotten books and did they represent 20% or 49% of her total reading (one assumes at least 51% did contain what she was looking for, although perhaps not quite worthy of “most typical”).

These are not, I trust, foolish quibbles, for the essence of this approach is to find within third- and fourth-rate authors sufficient material to discuss how first-rate authors may have been affected by...

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