Davidson 2004

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)