Piper 2009

Piper, Andrew. Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Introduction: Bibliographic Subjects

"Hypothesis: All is Leaf." -- J. W. Goethe

books <--> literature

"Learning how to read books and how to want books did not simply occur through the technological, commercial, or legal conditions that made the growing proliferation of books possible. The making of such bibliographic fantasies was also importantly a product of the very narratives and symbolic operations contained within books as well. It was through romantic literature where individuals came to understand themselves." (4)

"bibliographic surplus" at the turn of the 19th century (5)

• increasing diversity of books and bibliographic formats circulating
• increasing homogeneity of geography; books translated across multiple sites (6)

using bibliographic imagination of 19c to understand digital present (7)

"A study of how nineteenth-century individuals became wedded to or possessed by their books can broaden our perspective of the nature of 'new media' cultures and historical experiences of 'media transition. It can offer parallels, but also differences, to our current process of adapting to communicative change." (7)

emphasizing continuities between bookish past and digital present; similarities:

• the notion of a network
• the status of the "copy"
• remediating culture data into new forms
• creativity as intermedial thinking/making (7-8)

these communicative practices "came into being" during the romantic age (8)

"The digital provides us wit ha critical lens to see the bibliographic with fresh eyes. But my own work is driven by an alternative desire to show us how the history of books, and romantic books in particular, can help us contextualize our understanding of digital or new media today." (8)

book history helps us recover a sense of "social authorship" (9-10); but literature can also tell us much about the history of the book (10)

"Literature makes books as much as books make literature." (11)

"I am interested in exploring how the symbolic movements in texts, whether of speech, things, or people, functioned as interpretations of the bibliographic environments through which such texts circulated. ... I want to ask how such circulatory energy was deployed to interrogate new conditions of communicating in books." (11)

in literary studies, romantic age gave us opposition between technics and aesthetics, encouraging us to forget the materiality of the book -- in fact, focusing on book as object was seen as a mental disorder during the early 19c; yet book history shows upsurge in production of books during this period (12)

• book was becoming "naturalized" during the 19c (13)

"The work of romantic writers -- both their books and their fictions -- functioned as a key space where the changes to the material conditions of writing and communication that defined the nineteenth century could be rehearsed, interrogated, and ultimately normalized." (13)