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

“大索引和小纲要”：乔治亚时代英国的阅读和常见

• 批准号: AH/E50356X/1
• 负责人: David Allan
• 金额: $ 3.12万
• 依托单位: University of St Andrews
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2007
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2007 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FE50356X%2F1
• 关键词: Large; Indexes; Little; Compendiums; Reading

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.

这个项目调查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，因为它是在格鲁吉亚英格兰实行的，现在学者们普遍认为，共同安置在古代有很深的根源，当汇编的明智的说法和喜爱的段落第一次被认为是一个重要的教育工具;人们也承认，文艺复兴之后，在人文主义者对语言学和教育学的强烈关注的鼓舞下，对它的兴趣明显复苏。然而，这个项目的出发点是这样一个发现：从现存的档案证据的分量来看，只有在1700年到1830年左右，英国普通书的黄金时代才最终出现--奇怪的是，在这一时期，人们总是认为普通书的地位在范围和意义上都大幅下降。在18世纪的文化中，一系列通常与印刷媒体日益占主导地位直接相关的因素，将被证明为手稿共同放置的典型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，从报纸和杂志到主要的学术和文学作品，提供了越来越多样化的材料，普通的放置技术可以很容易地应用。格鲁吉亚文学批评的发明，无论是作为学术还是作为新闻事业，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接触。与此同时，普遍的启蒙运动强调智能和反思性阅读的好处，作为一种自我认识的途径，如艾迪生和沙夫茨伯里等权威人士令人信服地阐述了这一点，使许多长期以来固有的普通放置程序在1700年后的几十年里显得更加有用。因为它直接基于对这一时期幸存的英语普通书籍的详细研究，这本书是这一项目的高潮，它特别注意到共同放置的技术特点，以及它们帮助塑造格鲁吉亚读者的活动和经验的方式。例如，它提供了许多证据，证明这些做法影响了读者在各个层面的行为，从他们对体裁的广泛品味（特别是鼓励他们偏爱歌曲和说教散文）到他们对复杂文本中某些类型材料的关注（例如墓志铭和演讲，其中的普通人特别陶醉）。此外，印刷材料的具体技术，以产生手稿摘录已被证明影响个人的欣赏和理解他们所读的。特别是，我们会看到，从著名文本中摘录的段落，正是因为它们在被转移到一本普通的书中时经历了彻底的去语境化和再语境化，所以对个体读者来说经常具有新的和不可预测的意义。通过将注意力直接集中在阅读的历史行为所产生的证据上，这本书因此具有广泛的意义。它将为我们理解斯威夫特、约翰逊和拜伦时代的文学文化演变的独特背景提供重要的补充。然而，它也将是相当感兴趣的文学学者，理论家和历史学家谁最近一直在寻求理解阅读作为一种熟悉的文化实践的性质和含义的不同社区。