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

这个项目调查了公共放置的本质和影响——最基本的是一套复制和记录自己阅读的技术——就像它在乔治时代的英国一样。现在，学者们普遍认为，在古代，编撰智慧语录和喜爱的段落是一种重要的教育工具。人们也承认，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，人们对它的兴趣有了明显的复苏。然而，这个项目的出发点是一个发现，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，在这段时间里，人们总是认为普通书的范围和重要性都大大下降了。在这项研究中，通常与18世纪文化中印刷媒体日益占主导地位直接相关的一系列因素将被证明为手稿共同放置的特征实践提供了持续的鼓励。例如，文化水平的提高增加了参与各种阅读练习的人数。同样，印刷品的生产和供应的迅速扩大，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，可以很容易地应用普通的放置技术。格鲁吉亚发明的文学批评，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主义，鼓励他们评价和反思，而不仅仅是记录他们与文本的接触。与此同时，无处不在的启蒙运动强调智慧和反思性阅读的好处，认为它是通往自我认识的途径，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，这使得许多长期以来一直是普通场所固有的程序在1700年后的几十年里变得更有用了。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，所以这个项目的高潮是这本书特别警惕共同放置的技术特征，以及它们帮助塑造格鲁吉亚读者的活动和经历的方式。它提供了很多证据，例如，这些做法在各个层面上影响了读者的行为，从他们对体裁的广泛品味（特别是鼓励他们喜欢的歌曲和道德散文）到他们对复杂文本中某些材料的关注（比如墓志铭和演讲，其中的俗气特别引人注目）。此外，印刷材料产生手稿摘录的具体技术被证明影响了个人对他们所阅读的内容的欣赏和理解。特别是，我们会看到，从知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，受到了激进的去语境化和再语境化的影响，对个人读者来说，往往具有新的和不可预测的意义。通过将注意力直接集中在由阅读的历史行为产生的证据上，本书因此具有广泛的含义。它将为我们理解斯威夫特、约翰逊和拜伦时代的文学文化形成的独特背景提供重要补充。然而，它也会引起文学学者、理论家和历史学家等不同群体的极大兴趣，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.