Davidson 2004

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Toward a History of Texts

focus on 1) mentalites, 'the interpretive grid (lost but largely recoverable) in and around which those readers read" (60) and 2) "the codes or rules of fictive discourse" (60)

combining history of the book and reception theory to create a history of the text (61)

using diaries and letters, as well as marginalia, to show how readers read

unstatistical survey of early American novels: women's signatures in the books outnumber men's ~2 to 1; male names outnumber female in subscription lists, though

"archaeology of reading"; "thick description" (Geertz) of reading from multiple sites of evidence

"The novel, I argue throughout this study, became the chapbook of the c19 -- that is, a cheap book accessible to those who were not educated at the prestige men's colleges, who were outside the established literary tradition, and who ... for the most part read few books besides novels. Given both the literary insularity of many novel readers and the increasing popularity of the novel, the new genre necessarily became a form of education, especially for women. Novels allowed for a means of entry into a larger literary and intellectual world and a means of access to social and political events from which many readers (particularly women) would have been otherwise largely excluded. The first novels, I would also argue, provided the citizens of the time not only with native versions of the single most popular form of literary entertainment in America, but also with literary versions of emerging definitions of America -- versions that were, from the first, tinged with ambivalence and duplicity." (67)
"All history is choice, discourse that begins with the very questions the historian chooses to as (or not ask) of his or her own version of the past. Fiction cannot be simply 'fit into its historical context', as if context were some Platonic pigeonhole and all that is dark or obscure in the fiction is illuminated when the text is finally slipped into the right slow. If we argue that history provides the context, then who or what, we must also ask, provides the history?" (70)

The Book in the New Republic

took business in early national period is "strikingly small and localized", supplies obtained from England; changed dramatically in second half of c19 (74)

"The struggles of the book industry during the early national period and the struggles by native American novelists to establish their own genre mirror each other. In both cases, the spirit was willing, even if the economy was not." (75)

James Fenimore Cooper, 1820s; first wide-selling author able to support himself by his writing (75)


Ideology and Genre

"the novel threatened not just to coexist with elite literature but to replace it ... The crucial matter was not so much a question of how common citizens invested that time allowed for reading but the question of where the society vested the voice (or voices) of authority." (105)

critics of the novel predicted its rise -- were scared of it before it grew in popularity (105)

ministers as experts in culture, history, literature in local communities; largest libraries; novels erode his authority (106); by 1853, commentators note ministers already have lost their authority (107)

fiction is "dyadic sender-receiver form" communication (Dell Hymes);

  • "With this form, the meaning of the text is embedded in the experience of decoding the message and thus cannot be separated from the act of reading itself. although a scientific treatise may be paraphrased without any significant loss of validity or substance, a novel cannot, and to summarize the argument of the plot is not to convey the essence of the fiction. In a sense, the novel is its reading, and that reading must finally be private and personal." (106-7)
"with the advent of the market-model of literary production, exemplified by the rise of the novel, we have not just a new form, new authors, and a new audience, we also have a new contract between the producers and consumers of print." (108)

no more middle man in literary discourse

flood of print -- "readers were increasingly eager to participate in the creation' of meaning, of public opinion, or culture -- not just to serve as the consumers of meanings articulated by others" (109) -- Bakhtin, "authorizing" readers as interpreters and participants in culture

"main object of censure is the woman reader, who, not coincidentally, is also the implied reader of most of the fiction of the era"; issue of "legitimacy -- who is and who is not the legitimate audience of literature and, lses theoretically, who are to be the legitimate heirs of the Republic" (110)

critique of fiction coming from Scottish Common Sense philosophers (Henry Home, Lord Kames, Thomas Reid, James Beattie, Vicissimus Knox)in 1740s, 1750s; tracts and books imported to/reprinted in New World (114); well-born men concerned about lower-class women

novels full of fantasies; but "also a hard core of formal realism in the novel that was not acknowledged by the critics of the time" (118)

  • biographies, histories create distance between reader & events depicted
  • novel "creates its own truth by involving the reader in the process of that creation"; "the reader is privileged in relationship to the text, is welcomed into the text, and, in a sense, becomes the text" (118)

Literacy, Education, and the Reader

on literacy rates, "necessary to ask not only who could read but what they read; not only what they read but in what context" (122)

"what any statistics obscure is that literacy is a process, not a fixed point or a line of demarcation" (126); more like "literateness"