Commonplace-book stylistics : romantic and victorian technologies of reading and writing
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- "Commonplace-Book Stylistics" offers a theory of composition based on nineteenth-century commonplace books, which were personal collections of quotations and information. Between 1795 and 1900 the tradition evolved from handwritten quotations in blank books to cut-and-pasted newspaper clippings in scrapbooks. Simultaneously, the types of quotation readers recorded changed dramatically. While Romantic writers liberally revised the words (and often the meaning) of texts they transcribed into their commonplace books, Victorians endorsed a growing celebrity culture as they preserved cartoons and photographs of their favorite writers alongside quotations. My project demonstrates how authors' engagements with new systems for arranging gathered information in commonplace books facilitated larger stylistic trends. For example, Coleridge repackaged other authors' verse in Biographia Literaria, Hazlitt translated poetry into prose for his essays, and Tennyson circulated commonplaces in In Memoriam. Joining history-of-the-book methodology and literary formalism, my project reads manuscript commonplace books for their structural qualities and analyzes how new ways for organizing extracts influenced literary style, particularly patterns of quotation. Ultimately, "Commonplace-Book Stylistics" re-contextualizes our understanding of central nineteenth-century texts by returning them to their material beginnings. Furthermore, it advocates for a reformulation of literature that attends to the specificity of material networks of reception and composition that nurtured both canonical and non-canonical texts alike.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2012 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Hess, Jillian Marissa |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, English Department |
| Primary advisor | Gigante, Denise, 1965- |
| Primary advisor | Moretti, Franco, 1950- |
| Thesis advisor | Gigante, Denise, 1965- |
| Thesis advisor | Moretti, Franco, 1950- |
| Thesis advisor | Woloch, Alex, 1970- |
| Advisor | Woloch, Alex, 1970- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Jillian Marissa Hess. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of English. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2012. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2012 by Jillian Marissa Hess
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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