British Literature and Print Culture ed. by Sandro Jung (review)

The first two essays in this volume from the English Association, along with its introduction by Mr. Jung, will interest those working on print history, with their focus on popular literature, namely Behn's Oroonoko, and works published "for the Author" by subscription. The remainder of the collection takes one up through the Victorian period and into the early twentieth century. For the Scriblerian reader, this review will concentrate on texts created in the early eighteenth century.

As Mr. Jung highlights in his introduction, print-culture studies is a rapidly expanding field, which is actively supported by both bibliographical groups and growing programs in the history of the book and material culture. New digital projects such as the Database of Eighteenth-Century Book Illustration are being constructed and existing ones such as A Database of Cheap Literature, 1837-1860 complement the costly subscription EEBO and ECCO databases and make exploration of these topics possible in ways difficult to conceive of even fifteen years ago.

Laura Runge, in "Tracing a Genealogy of Oroonoko's Editions," makes what would have been an inconceivable claim when I was a graduate student in the late 1970s, that this seventeenth-century short fiction has achieved "'hypercanonicity"' along with Shakespeare's plays and Paradise Lost through the sheer number and variety of its editions. Most recently, it has inspired fourteen different editions and eight translations between 1985 and 2002, according to Behn's long-time bibliographer Mary Ann O'Donnell, with seven recent hypertext editions now available on the web, in addition to audio book versions and its inclusion in multiple standard teaching anthologies. As Ms. Runge tellingly points out, the early textual history of the work makes selecting an edition to cite for scholarly purposes or to use in a classroom particularly fraught: "as the history of Oroonoko texts makes clear, the push to make available classroom editions of 'recovered' writers is neither intellectually nor ideologically neutral." In addition, the instability of Behn's text through its multiple versions, since its first appearance in 1688 while Behn was in her final illness, highlights the larger problem that "women generally have been subject to far less bibliographical study than have their male counterparts," and much less consideration has been given to the ways in which women edit, and have been edited. Ms. Runge has a useful appendix of features of editions created between 1688 and 2010.

J. A. Downie shifts our attention from the treatment of single author best-sellers and the ways in which editorial decisions shaped the contents of various editions to a consideration of the ways in which we have configured the relationship between author and publisher as being significantly altered after 1695 and the lapse of the Licensing Act and subsequent establishment of copyright. He argues persuasively that "if authors really wanted to see their work in print, then the best way for them to achieve their objective, even after the passing of the Copyright Act, would have been to publish at his or her own risk." As he points out, even with the explosive success of self-publishing today through ebooks and Amazon, there is still a critical bias against authors who pay to have their works published as being somehow unable or unworthy of finding a "real" publisher, i.e., indulging in vanity printing. He argues that subscription publications, in effect, replaced earlier systems of patronage and, in contrast to models of copyright publishing, permitted the publication of controversial works, such as Pope's Dunciad, the initial costs of which were borne by the author, but which returned enough to cover those costs and make a profit. Mr. Downie highlights as well how our misperception of subscription publication has obscured the way that eighteenth-century women writers used subscription publication as a way to generate income, from Mary Barber's Poems to Frances Burney's Camilla. Most tellingly, he points out that even though Austen "made a healthy profit by...