'Large Indexes and Little Compendiums': Reading and Commonplacing in Georgian England

这个项目调查了共同安置的性质和影响--最基本的是一套抄写和记录自己阅读的技术--就像它在格鲁吉亚英语中的做法一样。现在，学者们普遍认为，共同安置起源于古代，当时智慧谚语和最受欢迎的段落的汇编最初被认为是一种重要的教育工具；它也被承认，在文艺复兴之后，在人文主义者强烈的语言学和教育学关注的鼓励下，人们对它的兴趣明显复苏。然而，这个项目的出发点是发现，从现存的档案证据的重量来看，只有在大约1700年到1830年之间，英语普通书籍的黄金时代才终于出现--奇怪的是，在这段时间里，人们总是假设普通书籍的程度和意义都大幅下降。在这项研究中，一系列通常直接与18世纪文化中印刷媒体日益主导有关的因素将被证明为手稿共同放置的特有做法提供了持续的鼓励。例如，识字水平的提高增加了从事各种阅读活动的人数。同样，印刷品的生产和供应迅速扩大，从报纸和杂志到重要的学术和文学作品，提供了更多样化的材料，可以很容易地应用常见的排版技术。格鲁吉亚对文学批评的发明，无论是作为一种学术还是作为一种新闻事业，似乎也加强了读者固有的判断力，鼓励他们评价和反思，以及简单地记录他们与文本的遭遇。与此同时，艾迪森和沙夫茨伯里等权威人士令人信服地阐述了智能和反思性阅读作为自我认识途径的好处，这一普遍的启蒙运动强调了许多长期存在于共同安置的内在程序在1700年后的几十年里似乎更有用，而不是更不有用。由于它直接基于对这一时期幸存的英语普通书籍的详细研究，本项目最终达到高潮的这本书特别警惕共同安置的技术特征以及它们帮助塑造格鲁吉亚读者的活动和经历的方式。例如，它提供了大量证据表明，这些做法影响了读者各个层面的行为，从他们对体裁的广泛品味(特别是鼓励他们喜欢歌曲和说教散文)，到他们对复杂文本中特定类型材料的专注(例如，平凡之处特别令人陶醉的墓志铭和演讲)。此外，印刷材料制作手稿摘录的特定技术被证明影响了个人对所读内容的欣赏和理解。特别是，我们将看到，摘录自著名文本的段落，正是因为它们被转移到一本普通的书中时，受到了激进的去语境化和重新语境化的影响，经常对个人读者具有新的和不可预测的意义。这本书直接将注意力集中在历史阅读行为产生的证据上，因此具有广泛的影响。它将对我们理解斯威夫特、约翰逊和拜伦时代的文学文化发展的独特背景做出重要的补充。然而，它也将引起不同的文学学者、理论家和历史学家的相当大的兴趣，他们最近一直在试图理解阅读作为一种熟悉的文化实践的本质和含义。

This project investigates the nature and impact of common placing-at its most basic, a set of techniques for copying out and recording one's own reading-as it was practiced in Georgian England.It is now widely accepted by scholars that common placing had deep roots in antiquity, when the compilation of wise sayings and favourite passages had first been recognised as an important educational tool; and it is also acknowledged that there was a marked revival of interest in it following the Renaissance, encouraged by the intense philological and pedagogical concerns of the humanists. This project, however, takes its starting point from the discovery that, judging from the weight of the surviving archival evidence, it was only between around 1700 and 1830 that the golden age of the English commonplace book finally occurred-a period during which, curiously, it has invariably been assumed that common placing substantially declined both in extent and in significance.In this study, a series of factors usually associated straightforwardly with the increasing dominance of print media in eighteenth-century culture will be shown to have provided continuing encouragement for the characteristic practices of manuscript common placing. Rising levels of literacy, for example, increased the number of individuals engaged in every kind of reading practice. Similarly, the rapid expansion in the production and availability of printed matter, from newspapers and magazines to major works of scholarship and literature, supplied ever-more-diverse material to which common placing techniques could readily be applied. The Georgian invention of literary criticism, both as an academic and as a journalistic enterprise, also appears to have intensified the inherent judgmentalism of readers, encouraging them to evaluate and to reflect upon as well as simply to record their encounters with texts. Meanwhile, the pervasive Enlightenment stress upon the benefits of intelligent and reflective reading as a route to self-knowledge, convincingly articulated by authorities like Addison and Shaftesbury, made many of the procedures which had long been intrinsic to common placing appear more rather than less useful in the decades after 1700.Because it is based directly on the detailed study of surviving English commonplace books from this period, the book in which this project culminates is especially alert to the technical features of common placing and to the ways in which they helped shape the activities and experiences of Georgian readers. It offers much evidence, for example, that these practices affected readers' behaviour at every level, from their broad tastes in genre (notably encouraging them to favoured songs and moralistic prose) to their concentration upon certain kinds of material within complex texts (such as the epitaphs and speeches in which commonplaces particularly reveled). Moreover, the specific techniques by which printed materials were made to yield manuscript extracts are shown to have influenced individuals' appreciation and understanding of what they read. In particular, it will be seen that excerpted passages from well-known texts, precisely because they were subjected to radical decontextualisation and recontextualisation when transferred to a commonplace book, frequently took on new and unpredictable meanings for individual readers.By focussing attention directly upon the evidence generated by historical acts of reading, this book therefore has wide­ ranging implications. It will make an important addition to our understanding of the distinctive context in which the literary culture of the ages of Swift, Johnson and Byron evolved. It will also, however, be of considerable interest to the diverse community of literary scholars, theorists and historians who have recently been seeking to comprehend the nature and implications of reading as a familiar cultural practice.