Please join us for the next seminar of Inventions of the Text 2012/13
Literature and the Book TradeProfessor David Duff
Trinity College Dublin
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Wednesday 1st May 2013
5:30 – 7:00 pm
Department of English Studies, Hallgarth House Seminar Room
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Speaker: Dr. Clemens Ruthner, University of Aberdeen
A
significant feature of the Romantic book world is the ‘prospectus’, a
type of printed flyer (typically between one and four pages long) used
to announce a projected book, series, journal or newspaper. Associated
particularly with subscription publishing and with expensive,
large-scale ventures such as encyclopaedias and other multi-volume
series, the genre acquired new visibility in this period as the
publishing industry expanded, periodicals proliferated, and pre-selling
techniques became more common. In the revolutionary 1790s, prospectuses
took on an increasingly polemical tone, often becoming a form of
pamphlet or manifesto, as in Coleridge’s ‘flaming Prospectus’ to The
Watchman and the much-cited Prospectus to The Anti-Jacobin, while also
heralding an ever-widening range of publications (and lecture series)
across literature, science and other fields. At once preview and
overview, foretaste and rationale, the prospectus shares with other
paratextual devices like the ‘preface’ an anticipatory and explanatory
function, but differs in its more speculative emphasis, since the
announced work may not (and often did not) appear, its realisation being
dependent in part on the response of prospective readers/investors to
the announcement itself. The incorporation of the prospectus into the
metalanguage and generic repertoire of literary Romanticism, most
famously in Wordsworth’s description of a seminal passage from his
unfinished philosophical poem The Recluse as ‘a kind of Prospectus of
the design and scope of the whole poem’, thus raises a number of
interesting questions. On the one hand, it epitomises the provisional,
preparatory quality of Romantic writing, interpretable positively in
terms of a Schlegelian poetics of the fragment or sketch (and as an
especially confident form of theoretical self-reflection), or negatively
along the lines of Peacock’s Paper Money Lyrics, which satirise
contemporary poetry, with its over-ambition and dismal record of
completion, as a series of worthless promissory notes. On the other hand, it offers further evidence of what Andrew Piper calls the
Romantic ‘bibliographic imagination’, the saturation of Romantic
aesthetic discourse in the language and logic of book-making,
notwithstanding writers’ problematic relationship to publishers and
deep- seated mistrust of the reading public. My paper will explore these
questions, charting the development of the genre and term, and treating
a wide range of prospectuses and prospectus-like writings from the
period 1770 to 1820.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
David Duff is Professor of English and Research Coordinator for English
Literature in the School of Language & Literature. A graduate of
the University of York, from where he holds a doctorate, he taught in
Poland at the Nicholas Copernicus University of Torun and the University
of Gdansk before joining the staff at Aberdeen. He has also been a
visiting professor at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, USA,
and a guest lecturer at other American and European universities. He is a
founding member of the English Department's Centre for the Novel and a
contributor to the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies. His
professional affiliations include membership of the British Association
of Romantic Studies, the North American Society for the Study of
Romanticism, and the European Society for the Study of English. He is
Chair of the Council for College and University English and a Fellow of
the English Association.
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