Literary Cultures and the Material Book 9780712364034, 9780712306843

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Literary Cultures and the Material Book This book deals with two major subjects in the fast-growing discipline of book history. One, the relationship between literary cultures of all sorts and the material nature of the book on which those cultures ultimately depend. Two, the international, indeed global, nature of the book and the book trade which supports it. A range of thirty scholars of international standing explore the subject through studies which range in time from the earliest literary cultures of Egypt, Greece and Rome to the international book market of the twentieth century. In terms of geography the book encompasses China, Japan, India, Africa, Australasia, north and south America and Europe. It also includes studies of language 'empires' created by, among others, English, French, German, Spanish, and Chinese-speaking cultures. This is a global study of a global phenomenon: the book in all its guises and all its states.

The British Library Studies in the History of the Book LITERARY CULTURES AND THE MATERIAL BOOK

LITERARY CULTURES AND THE

MATERIAL BOOK Edited by SIMON ELIOT, ANDREW NASH and IAN WILLISON

The British Library 200 7

First published 2007 by The British Library 96 Euston Road London NWI 2DB

© the contributors 2007 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP record for this volume is available from The British Library ISBN

978 0 7123 06843

Designed by John Trevitt Typeset in Ehrhardt by Norman Tilley Graphics Ltd, Northampton and printed in England by Cromwell Press Ltd, Trowbridge, Wilts

CONTENTS

List of illustrations

page viii

List of contributors

Xl

Preface

XVI

Robert Darnton Acknowledgements

XIX

Introduction

I

Simon Eliot, Andrew Nash and Ian Willison Some material factors in literary culture 2500BCE-1900CE Simon Eliot

31

NON-WESTERN TRADITIONS OF THE BOOK

A thousand years of printed narrative in China

Glen Dudbridge Marketing the Tale of Genji in seventeenth-century Japan

53 65

Peter Kornicki Literary culture and manuscript culture in precolonial India

77

Sheldon Pollock The Shahnama and the Persian illustrated book

95

Robert Hillenbrand Towards a history of the book and literary culture in Africa

Isabel Hofineyr

v

121

Contents THE WESTERN BOOK IN HISTORY

Epic, diffusion and identity

133

Christopher Carey Carolingian manuscript culture and the making of the literary culture of the Middle Ages

147

David Ganz Petrarca philobiblon: the author and his books Nicholas Mann

159

The diffusion of literature in Renaissance Italy: the case of Pietro Bembo

175

Brian Richardson From literary almanacs to 'thick journals': the emergence of a readership for Russian literature, 1820S-1840S

19 1

Abram Reitblat and Christine Thomas LANGUAGE EMPIRES

Literary consequences of the peripheral nature of Spanish printing in the sixteenth century

207

Clive Griffin The conflicts of the canon: printing and literary culture during the Spanish Enlightenment

215

Marfa Luisa Lripez- Vidriero The book and Naturalism in Spain, Portugal and Latin America

231

Jean-Franfois Botre! Friedrich Nicolai: creator of the German republic of letters

241

Bernhard Fabian The German language and book trade in Europe: cultural transfers and collective identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

253

Frideric Barbier France between literary culture and mass culture: seventeenth to twentieth centuries

269

Jean- Yves Mollier Publishing and literature in the French-speaking world: the cultural hegemony of the centre and the creative role of the periphery

281

Franfojs Val/otton Jacques Hebert: foremost publisher of the Quiet Revolution

Jacques Michon

vi

297

Contents THE ANGLOPHONE TRADITION

Creating an English literary canon, 1679-1720: Jacob Tonson, Dryden and Congreve John Barnard

307

Literary culture and literary publishing in inter-war Britain: a view from Chatto & Windus Andrew Nash

323

'The elixir of life': Richard Garnett, the British Museum Library and literary London Richard Landon

343

The tradition of A. W. Pollard and the world of literary scholarship Stephen Bury

355

'In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?' Michael Winship

367

From Methodist literary culture to Canadian literary culture: the United Church Publishing House/the Ryerson Press, 1829-1970 Janet B. Friskney

379

'The centennial racket': J. C. Beaglehole, nationalism and the 1940 New Zealand centennial publications Sydney J Shep

387

'Heaven forbid that I should think of treating with an English publisher': the dilemma of literary nationalists in federated Australia John Barnes

399

AFTERWORD

Perspectives for an international history of the book David McKitterick

4 13

Index

431

Vll

ILLUSTRATIONS

Eliot I The Book of the Dead, coffin text 2

3 4 5 6 7

page 33

The Unknown Gospel, codex, Egypt, c. AD 100-150 The poems of Bacchylides, papyrus Ben Jonson, Works, title-page Walter Scott, Kenilworth, first edition in publisher's boards Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, 19 monthly parts Dicks's Sixpenny Pickwick Papers

8 The Oxford Book of English Verse

36

38 41 45 46

48 49

Dudbridge I

Sketch plan of Tang Chang'an

54

Kornicki I

2

Murasaki Shikibu writing the The Tale ofGenji Courtesan and samurai

Pollock I

Language map

84

Hillenbrand - illustrations of the Great Mongol Shahnama I 2

3 4 5 6

7 8

9 10

Iskandar and Taynush Iskandar fights the kardukan Iskandar builds a wall against Gog and Magog Iskandar consults the Talking Tree Iskandar enters the Land of Gloom Iskandar in single combat with the Fur of Hind Islandar builds a wall against Gog and Magog: detail Iskandar enthroned The Iron Warriors of Iskandar rout the army of the Fur of Hind Bier of Iskandar

VIIl

105 105

106 106 108 108

109 110 110 III

Illustrations Hofmeyr 1

Illustration by C. J. Montague from Bunyan

12 3

Carey 1

Homeric text on writing board

139

Ganz Early Caroline minuscule Manuscript list of books from monastery of Staffelsee 3 Vitruvius, De Architectura 4 Juvenal with glosses 1

2

Mann Simone Martini frontispiece, Ambrosian Virgil Page from Ambrosian Virgil showing Servius's commentary 3 Cicero, De responsis aurispicum, notes by Petrarch 4 Cicero, Somnjum Scipionjs, notes by Petrarch on commentary 1

2

Richardson 1

2

Petrarch, Aldus Manutius Pietro Bembo, Asolani, colophon

Reitblat fS Thomas 1 2

Polar [or Northern] Star Smirdin's journal, Library for Reading

195 202

LOpez-Vidriero Indians paying tribute Engraving reproducing Mexican codex 3-4 Watercolours 5 Binding 1

2

21 9 222 224 225

Michon 1

2

Covers of Editions de I'Homme and Editions du Jour Table of titles in Editions duJour, 1961-1980

299 30 4

Barnard Dryden, The Works of Virgil, frontispiece and title-page Dryden, The Works of Virgil, illustration 3-4 Spenser, Works 1 2

lX

312 3 13

315

Illustrations Nash 1 Edgar Wallace, The Frightened Lady, jacket 2 Aldington, The Colonel's Daughter, jacket 3 Richard Aldington, Death of a Hero, page showing expurgations 4 Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, Phoenix Library edition, jacket 5 Thomas McGreevy, T. S. Eliot, Dolphin Books edition, jacket 6 T. F. Powys, Mr Weston's Good Wine, Penguin edition, cover

324 329 330 336 338 339

Winship 1 Uncle Tom's Cabin, jigsaw puzzle 2 'Little Eva Song', handkerchief 3 Uncle Tom figurine

370 371 372

Shep 1 Centennial Survey, title spread 2 Spike magazine, title-page 3 Verses for my father, title-page 4 Christmas card designed by J. C. Beaglehole

388 391 392 394

Barnes 1 'Steele Rudd', On Our Selection!, title-page 2 On Our Selection!, 'Good Old Dad' 3 'Tom Collins', Such is Life, title-page 4 Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career, cover

402 402 403 407

x

CONTRIBUTORS

FREDiRIC BARBIER is a Directeur de Recherche at the CNRS and a Directeur d'Etudes at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (chaire d'Histoire et civilisation du livre, Sorbonne). Among his many publications are Trois cent ans de librairie et d'imprimerie (1979), I'Europe et fe livre (1996), Les Trois revolutions du livre (2000), Histoire des medias (3rd edn, 2003) and Histoire du livre (2nd edn, in progress). He directs the Centre de recherche en histoire du livre, and is editorin-chief of Histoire et civilisation du livre: revue internationale. JOHN BARNARD is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Leeds. He is the co-editor, with D. F. McKenzie, of Volume IV of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (2002) and has published widely on seventeenthcentury English literature and book history and on Keats and his contemporaries. JOHN BARNES is Emeritus Professor of English at La Trobe University and Senior Honorary Research Associate in the Centre for the Book at Monash University. He was the Foundation Editor of Meridian: The La Trobe University English Review, and now edits The La Trobe Journal for the State Library of Victoria Foundation. His books include The Penguin Henry Lawson: Short Stories (1986), The Order of Things: A Life ofJoseph Furphy (1990) and Socialist

Champion: Portrait of the Gentleman as Crusader (2006). JEAN-FRANC;:OIS BOTREL is Emeritus Professor of Hispanic Language and Culture at the University of Rennes 2 Bretagne (France). He was Director of the Centre de Recherches sur la Presse Iberique et Latino-amcricaine de Rennes 2 (PILAR) from 1986 to 1992. He is the author of some ISO contributions to contemporary Spanish cultural and book history including La diffusion du livre en Espagne (1988), Libros, prensa y lectores ... (1994) and Historia de fa ediciony fa lectura en Espana (2003). He is also President of the Sociedad de Literatura Espanola del siglo XIX and the Asociaci6n Internacional de Hispanistas. STEPHEN BURY is Head of European & American Collections at the British Library. He is author of Artists' Books (1995) and Artists' Multiples (2001). He has been leading the 21st Century Curator Project at the British Library since 2002.

xi

Contributors CHRISTOPHER CAREY is Professor of Greek at University College London and was formerly Professor of Classics at Royal Holloway University of London. He has taught in the UK (St Andrews, Royal Holloway, UCL and Cambridge) and the USA (University of Minnesota and Carleton College). He has published on Greek lyric poetry (especially Pindar), epic, tragedy and comedy, oratory and law, and is editor of the new Oxford text of Lysias. GLEN DUD BRIDGE retired as Shaw Professor of Chinese, University of Oxford, in 2005. Over much of the past forty years his research has focused on Chinese traditional narrative works, both literary and popular, in relation to their historical and social environment. Among his books are The Hsi-yu chi (1970), The Legend of Miaoshan (1978, rev. 2004), The Tale of Li Wa (1983), Religious Experience and Lay Society in T'ang China (1995), Lost Books of Medieval China (2000) and Books, Tales and Vernacular Culture (2005). SIMON ELIOT is Professor of the History of the Book in the University of London. A Director of the Reading Experience Database (RED), he is also editor of the journal Publishing History. Among his publications are Some Patterns and Trends in British Publishing 1800-1919 (1994) and the co-edited volumes A Handbook to Literary Research (1998) and The Blackwell Companion to the History of the Book (2007). He is general editor of the new four-volume History of Oxford University Press (due for publication in 2012-13). BERNHARD FABIAN is Emeritus Professor of English Literature and Bibliography at the WestHilische Wilhelms-Universitat, Miinster (Germany). He has published widely on eighteenth-century English literature and on the literary relations between England and Germany. His books include The English Book in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Panizzi Lectures 1991). He is general editor of the multi-volume Handbuch der historischen Buchbestiinde (1992-2001). JANET B. FRISKNEY is Associate Editor with Volume 3 of the History ofthe Book in CanadalHistoire du livre et de I'imprime au Canada. A specialist in Canadian publishing history, her research to date includes studies of McClelland and Stewart's New Canadian Library series, and the history of library and publishing services for the blind in Canada. DAVID G ANZ is Professor of Palaeography at King's College, London. He works on the manuscript culture of the early middle ages, and has published on Corbie in the Carolingian Renaissance (1990), chapters on 'Book Production and the Rise of Caroline Minuscule' in the New Cambridge Medieval History, Volume 2 (1995) and on 'The Anglo-Saxon Library' in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Great Britain and Ireland (2006). In addition he has produced articles on the scriptoria of Luxeuil and Tours, Roman Manuscripts in France and England, and Latin shorthand in the early Middle Ages, as well on Carolingian theology and on Einhard. CLIVE GRIFFIN is University Lecturer in Latin American Literature, Oxford;

xii

Contributors Fellow and Tutor in Spanish, Trinity College, Oxford. His publications include

The Crombergers of Seville: The History of a Printing and Merchant Dynasty (19 88), Los Cromberger de Sevilla: la historia de una imprenta del siglo XVI en Sevilla y Mijico (1991) and Journeymen-Printers, Heresy, and the Inquisition in

Sixteenth-Century Spain (2005). ROBERT HILLENBRAND is Professor of Islamic Art at the University of Edinburgh. He has written and edited numerous books on Islamic art, architecture, iconography and painting. From 1999 to 2004 he was Co-Director of the Cambridge-Edinburgh Shahnama Project, which has produced a database of illustrations of the national epic of Iran. He is currently Director of the newly established Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World. ISABEL HOFMEYR is Professor of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She recently published The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim's Progress (2004). She is currently working on textual exchanges and circuits between South Africa and India. PETER KORNICKI is professor of Japanese cultural history and bibliography at the University of Cambridge. Among other things he has published Early

Japanese Books in Cambridge University Library: A Catalogue of the Aston, Satow and von Siebold Collections, with N. Hayashi (1991), La bibliotheque japonaise de Leon de Rosny (1994), The book inJapan: a cultural history from the beginnings to the nineteenth century (1998) and Catalogue of the Early Japanese books in the Russian State Library, Volume 2 (2004). . RICHARD LANDON is the Director of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto and a Professor in the Department of English. He has lectured and published widely on various aspects of the history of the book and his latest publication is Bibliophi/ia Scholastica Floreat: Fifty Years ofRare Books and Special Collections at the University of Toronto (2005). MARiA LUISA L6PEZ-VIDRIERO is the Director of the Royal Library in Madrid. She is also co-director of the Institute for the History of the Book and Reading in Salamanca, and is an Honorary Associate of The Hispanic Society of America. She has published widely in the field of history of the book, covering mainly the eighteenth century: Specvlvm principvm: nuevas lecturas currjculares, nuevos usos de /a 'Ljbreria del Principe' en e/ Setecientos (2002). She is co-editor of El Libro Antiguo Espafiol (1988-2002), a series of proceedings on printing and writing culure history. DAVID McKITTERICK FBA is Honorary Professor of Historical Bibliography at Cambridge. He has been Librarian and Fellow of Trinity College since 1986, and was awarded the gold medal of the Bibliographical Society in 2005. He is a member of the editorial board of The Book Collector, and is one of the general editors of the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Among his books are the Xlll

Contributors standard history of Cambridge University Press (3 vols, 1992-2004) and Print,

Manuscript and the Searchfor Order, 1450-1830 (2003). NICHOLAS MANN is Dean of the School of Advanced Study and Pro-ViceChancellor, University of London; Professor of Renaissance Studies. Among his publications are: Petrarch Manuscripts in the British Isles (1975), Petrarch (1984), A Concordance to Petrarch's Bucolicum Carmen (1984), Giordano Bruno 15831585: the English Experience (1997), The Image of the Individual: portraits in the Renaissance (1998) and Britannia Latina. Latin in the Culture of Great Britain from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (2005). JACQUES MICHON is professor at Universite de Sherbrooke, where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Book and Publishing History and directed the Groupe de recherche sur l'edition litteraire au Quebec (GRELQ). He has published extensively on book history and is an editor of Volume 3 of the History ofthe Book

in CanadalHistoire du livre et de l'imprime au Canada. JEAN-YVES MOLLIER is Professor of Contemporary History and Director of the Ecole Doctorale Cultures, Organisations, Legislations at the University of Versailles Saint-Q!Ientin-en-Yvelines. He has published a number of works on the history of publishing, including Louis Hachette 1800-1864. Le fondateur d'un empire (1999), La lecture et ses publics d l'epoque contemporaine (2002) and

Le Camelot et la rue. Politique et democratie au tournant des XIXe et XXe siecles (2004). ANDREW NASH is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Reading. He has published essays on various aspects of Victorian and early-twentiethcentury literature and publishing history. He is the editor of The Culture of Collected Editions (2003) and author of Kailyard and Scottish Literature (2007). SHELDON POLLOCK is William B. Ransford Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Columbia University, and formerly George V. Bobrinskoy Distinguished Service Professor of Sanskrit and Indic Studies at the University of Chicago. His areas of specialization are Sanskrit philology, and Indian literary and intellectual history. Recent books include The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (2006), The Ends of Man at the End of Premodernity (2005) and (ed.) Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructionsfrom South Asia (2003). ABRAM ILICH REITBLAT is head of the Department of Rare Books of the Russian Art State Library and the member of editorial staff of journal Novoje Literaturnoe Obozrenie [New Literary Review]. He is the author of Ot Bovy k

Bal'montu: ocherki po istorii chteniia v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka [From Bova to Balmont: Topics in the History of Reading in Russia in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century] (1991) and Kak Push kin vychel v genii: Istoriko-sociologocheskie ocherki 0 knirznoj kul'ture Puszkinskoj epohi [How Pushkin became a XIV

Contributors genius: Historico-sociological studies on books culture of Pushkin's times] (2001) and several other works on the historical sociology of Russian literature. BRIAN RICHARDSON is Professor ofltalian Language at the University of Leeds. ~is publications on the history of the book and the history of the Italian language mclude Print Culture in Renaissance Italy: The Editor and the Vernacular Text, 1470-1600 (1994), Printing, Writers and Readers in Renaissance Italy (1999) and an edition of Fortunio's Regole grammaticali of 1516 (2001). Since 2003 he has been general editor of the Modern Language Review. SYDNEY SHEP is Senior Lecturer in Print and Book Culture at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She has published widely on a range of research topics, including the history of paper and paper making in nineteenthcentury New Zealand, edible typography and street graffiti, Wellington's book trade history, and diasporic print cultures. She has co-edited Preservation Management for Libraries, Archives (S Museums (2006), and is editor of SHARP News and Script (S Print: Bibliographic Society of Australia and New Zealand BUlletin. She also runs Wai-te-ata Press, a letterpress facility founded in 1962 by the late D. F. McKenzie. CHRISTINE THOMAS was formerly the Head of Slavonic and East European Collections in the British Library. She has published on the history of Russian printing, the formation of the Russian collections of the British Museum Library and Slavonic early-printed books. She is a co-compiler of Cyrillic Books printed before 1701 in British and Irish Collections: a Union Catalogue (2000) and author of its introductory essay on the provenance of early-printed Cyrillic books in Britain and Ireland. She is also editor of Solanus: internationaljournalfor Russian

and East European bibliographic, library and publishing studies.

FRAN~OIS V ALLOTTON is Assistant Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Lausanne, where he specialises in teaching media history. He is the author of numerous contributions to Swiss cultural and intellectual history, notably his thesis dealing with the history of Swiss francophone publishing L'edition romande et ses acteurs 1850-1920 (2001). He also works on the development of the Fondation Memoire Editoriale, dedicated to the preservation and analysis of Swiss publishing archives IAN WILLISON is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London. He is one of the three general editors of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain and contributed to the previous symposia held in Sherbrooke and Prato.

~ICHAEL WINSHIP is Iris Howard Regents Professor of English at the UniverSity of Texas at Austin. His books include the final three volumes of Bibliography of American Literature (1983-1991) and American Literary Publishing at MidNineteenth Century: The Business of Ticknor and Fields (1995). He is an editor and contributor to the forthcoming volume three of A History of the Book in America. xv

PREFACE

This book marks a high point in the history of book history. It carries the subject around the world and back to the beginning of recorded time, yet it does not pretend to cover everything. On the contrary, it offers short, incisive essays which slice into their subjects from unfamiliar angles and challenge common views. Its ambition is not to be encyclopedic, but to provoke thought. What better way to be provocative than to begin not with Gutenberg, nor with Shakespeare, nor the Bible but rather with 'A Thousand Years of Printed Narrative in China'? Glen Dudbridge takes us back to tenth-century China, where a soo-chapter encyclopedia has been compiled and printed by special commission from the emperor. The encyclopedia reformulates and packages all sorts of tales and anecdotes that had floated through the oral communication networks of ancient China - all the way back to a collection of commonplace books 'created from the talk of streets and lanes, from hearsay on the road' in the first century AD. But the encyclopedia and the wood blocks from which it was printed disappeared and were largely forgotten - until the revival of block printing in the sixteenth century and the reappropriation of ancient tales in the modern literature of the 1920S. By taking great leaps through time - from the first century to the tenth, the sixteenth and the twentieth - Dudbridge evokes vast currents of narratives that swirled through history, channeled into libraries at some times, classified into genres at others, fixed in print, reworked in literary histories, and continuously flooding the landscape in ways that defied ordering. It is a breathtaking spectacle; and after admiring it, the student of western literature goes back to Diderot or the brothers Grimm or !talo Calvino with a dizzying sense of fresh perspectives. The history of the book cannot be contained within the boundary markers familiar in the West - not the transition from volumen to codex, nor the reinvention of movable type, nor the development of copyright, nor the Dewey decimal system, nor the Internet. Those innovations certainly left a mark on the history of books, but their decisiveness looks smaller when book history is enlarged to the scale of the globe. Globalization has become a buzz-word. This volume does not claim to globalize the study of books, because book historians have always recognized the arbitrariness of confining their subject within national boundaries. The printed XVI

Preface word never respected political divisions; and long before print, books were swept up in cultural currents, many of them oral and pictorial, that swirled around the globe. In discussing Persian books from the tenth century, Robert Hillenbrand cites the fables ofBidpai, which migrated in and out of scribal and oral media and through thirty languages from Iceland to Indonesia during the Middle Ages. In following The Pilgrim's Progress through Africa, Isabel Hofmeyr documents 80 translations and patterns of circulation that move between heaven and earth. But neither author intends simply to assert the importance of extending the history of the book beyond the West. That point is obvious. By broadening book history, these essays hold it up to a new light and examine it from original points of view. . One way to accomplish this aim is to begin from well-placed observation posts 1D the Far East. Peter Kornicki takes a wide-angle view of the Tale of Genji, the Japanese masterpiece composed by a woman author in the eleventh century. By the seventeenth century, it was circulating in printed editions, which varied from 62-volumes, lavishly illustrated and wildly expensive, to simple, single-volume digests, which cost little more than a day's wages for a skilled worker. The transfigurations of the text across the centuries and its diffusion through different strata of society call for different modes of analysis, particularly in the study of the ways it was read. Kornicki treats reading as a complex set of activities, relevant especially to defining the position of women in early modern Japan. Perhaps the most disconcerting view, at least for the historian of books in the West, is Sheldon Pollock's essay on the decisive events that shaped literary ~ulture in India - first, the invention of writing, which took place relatively late 1D South Asia (that is, around 260 BCE, long after Vedic texts had been fixed in memory systems and oral performances); second, the 'cosmopolitan revolution', which spread a common Sanskrit culture across all southern Asia as far as Java; third, the 'vernacular revolution,' which stimulated regional literatures; and fourth, the invention of 'script-mercantilism' or large-scale publishing. Those developments did not correspond closely to stages of book history in the West, and all but the first took place independently of technological change. The introduction of printing hardly mattered at all. Thanks to oral transmission and manuscript production - a huge industry in precolonial times, from which thirty million manuscripts have survived - literary culture remained relatively stable and widely diffused among a vast, illiterate population. Having taken in this material, the reader feels ready to look at the West with new eyes. Shading shifts, new nuances appear, and the general configuration looks less familiar. In place of the printing revolution, we see continuity, especially in manuscript production and in oral modes of transmission. Cultural factors displace technology as determinants - notably in the role played by old centres like Paris and London in legitimizing the new literatures of Quebec and Australia. Canon formation also looks more complex: avant-garde, modern English literature, shouldered off the marketplace by profit-minded publishers and conservative lending libraries, re-enters the mainstream through paperback editions and courses taught in universities. Through innovative book design and XVll

Preface strategies of list building, London publishers create a broad consensus about excellence in literature, despite the political and social divisions that threatened to tear the country apart in the early eighteenth century. Bibliography itself evolves in unpredictable directions, thanks to the peculiarities of librarian-men of letters like A. W. Pollard and Richard Garnett. Literary experience of all kinds seems to defy standard scenarios. Russian literature may have owed less to the westernizing influence of Peter the Great than to the custom of giving almanacs at the beginning of the year. A similar diet of ephemera - chapbooks, ballads, cheap romances - may have formed the literary culture that prepared the way for Don Quixote in Spain. Far from being restricted to a cultural elite, Homeric texts reached 'mass audiences' in ancient Greece. After being sung for centuries, they entered the education system in the form of set, scriptural texts - to such an extent that parents could monitor their children's progress by noting what book of the Iliad they were studying. To understand the emergence of the modern author in the person of Petrarch, we need to look beyond his crowning with the laurel wreath to his activities as a book collector. In fact, books abounded everywhere in Europe's distant past, even in the ninth century, when teams of scribes turned them out by a system that can be described as 'mass production'. True, a large Carolingian library contained only 400-600 volumes - not much in comparison with the 400,000 volumes in the library of medieval Muslim Cordoba. But the essays in this volume challenge us to discard whatever may be left of the notion that Gutenberg's invention revolutionized a book-poor Europe. They suggest instead that script culture, interacting with oral modes of transmission, conveyed a rich literature to a large public long before the spread of printing. Perhaps pre-Gutenberg Europe resembled pre-colonial India more than could be imagined from the standard wisdom among book historians pre-Literary Cultures and the Material Book. ROBERT DARNTON

Princeton, May 2007

XV11l

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors would like to thank Clive Field, Warwick Gould, Stephen Quirke, Elizabeth Savage Smith, Graham Shaw, Barry Taylor, Wim Van Mierlo, Frances Wood, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and David Stam for their help.

xix

INTRODUCTION SIMON ELIOT, ANDREW NASH AND IAN WILLISON

I

THIS BOOK HAS ITS ORIGINS in an international symposium held in London in 2004. The symposium was the third of a series, the first two of which had been held in Sherbrooke, Q!,Iebec in 2000 and in Prato in 2001. The series was the brainchild of Jacques Michon of the Universite de Sherbrooke and Jean-Yves Mollier of the Centre d'histoire culturelle des societes contemporaines of the Vniversite de Versailles Saint Quentin-en-Yvelines. One of the main aims of the symposia has been to set the rapidly growing discipline of book history - which until that time had largely been conceived as a nation-based discipline - into a much broader, international context. In this new perspective the movement of texts across and between countries and continents, and the relationship between trans-national political, religious, economic and linguistic groupings is as important as what took place within the borders of a single country. As books have almost always crossed borders and have, for economic and cultural reasons, looked for the richest and largest markets, this international perspective is proving a natural and appropriate one for book historians. The symposium at Sherbrooke concentrated on changes in book publishing that have taken place since the eighteenth century, primarily in terms of the three main publishing systems of Europe - French, British and German - and their expansion from the European centre to their respective cultural peripheries. The second symposium was organized by Wallace Kirsop of Monash University's Centre for the Book and held at the University's European Centre in Prato; it concentrated on the wider concept of 'Centre and periphery in the world of the book, 1500-2000'. The London symposium was given the task of considering the relationship between one of book history's main concerns, the material book, and the study of literary cultures. This was, of course, a difficult remit, as the subject could legitimately have included at least some aspects of most literate cultures since they began to appear in the third millennium BCE. Given the spirit of the series, We were very keen to stretch our international perspective as widely as possible. Thus we had to cover a broad geographical area as well as a long historical timeline. With only three days at our disposal, we had to be highly selective and exclude many subjects that we would have wanted to cover. There were also

SIMON ELIOT, ANDREW NASH AND IAN WILLISON

topics whose main (sometimes sole) authority was simply unavailable at the time of the symposium. The result was no more - but no less - than the first step in a major enterprise. Despite these limitations, the distinguished international group of scholars who met at the Centre for Manuscript and Print Studies in the Institute of English Studies in the University of London and at the British Library gave us an impressive array of papers. They ranged in time from 2500 Be to the 1960s and in space from, if not quite China to Peru, at least from China to south America. The subject was seen as particularly pressing and appropriate not only for book historians but also for a new generation of literary historians and critics, the first to have come to maturity since book history emerged as a formal discipline. Jean-Yves Mollier observes that earlier sorts of literary history were characterized by 'a refusal to submit "literariness" to any sharp analysis of its essential nature'. However, book and literary historians are now beginning to acknowledge that, in Glen Dudbridge's words, 'books [are] constructed into literatures by critics, editors, bibliographers, publishers and librarians'. Substantial evidence for this perception is the concern of the new Oxford English Literary History to give 'particular attention ... to the institutions in which literary acts take place (educated communities, publishing networks and so on)',' and of the New Cambridge History of English Literature to examine 'with the materialities of textual production, preservation and circulation'." As contributors to this volume suggest, similar revisions are due in other language areas covered in this book. Book historians are aware that they too have obligations to those studying literary cultures and their histories and, more broadly, to all those working on the ways in which knowledge, information and entertainment have been transmitted in human societies. As Michael Winship suggests, 'success will depend on their ability to practice the history of both print culture and the book, to take account of both the cultural and the material'. Here we see the effect of the thinking and practice of the 'new' book historians such as Febvre and Martin, Roger Chartier, Robert Darnton, and in the UK the late D. F. McKenzie. Specifically, as McKenzie saw in his exploration of the interaction of book history with literary history, the essential factor was the 'commercially and culturally promiscuous conditions' of the book trade. 3 The phrase 'the material book' perhaps need some glossing. For us it has two particular meanings. The first refers to the physical make-up of a book: its writing or printing surface (clay, papyrus, parchment, paper etc.), the way these surfaces are arranged (as separate tablets, as rolls, as codexes), the nature of the marks on the surface (cuneiform, hieroglyphics, ideographs, rustic capital, minuscule; gothic or roman type etc.), the way in which these surfaces are kept together (as linked tablets, as a cluster of rolls in a capsa, as a codex bound in wooden boards, as a 'perfect-bound' paperback), and so on. The second meaning refers to the physical and economic context in which the book has its existence: 2

Introduction how quickly or slowly it is made and multiplied by available technology, how portable it is, the cost of its making, the nature of transport available to distribute copies, the levels of wealth and literacy in a given society and all those other economic, technical, and social factors that tend to encourage or discourage the distribution and consumption of texts. Given the geographical spread and the chronological range of this study, we thought that it might be helpful to begin with an overview of the subject which took some of the major arguments of our volume and applied them to various types of material book available in a diversity of cultures over a wide span of time. 'Some material factors in literary culture' first touches on the manuscript book: on papyrus in Ancient Egypt; the clay-tablet book in Sumeria, Babylonia and Assyria; and the papyrus roll and early codex in Rome and Palestine. It then moves on to look at the ways in which some aspects of the materiality of the printed book - such as format, copyright and price - affected literary culture in Britain and the English-speaking world between the early seventeenth and early twentieth centuries. Although the subjects discussed in this book are wide-ranging and diverse, they do quite naturally cluster into four groups. Because we were very keen to avoid the comfortable but dangerously misleading 'western-centricity' of much traditional book history, we were determined to explore a number of nonWestern book and literary cultures. Thus in the first section, 'Non-western traditions of the book', our contributors explore aspects of the relationship between the material book and literary cultures in China, Japan, pre-colonial India, medieval Iran and nineteenth-century Africa. In the second section, 'The western book in history', we shift to perhaps more familiar literary territory but approach it in an unfamiliar way by looking at the impact that the evolution of material texts had on literary culture of Europe: from Greece in eighth-seventh century BCE to Russia in the nineteenth century, by way of the Carolingian ~mpire, Petrarch's book collection, and printing and publishing in early Sixteenth-century Venice. The third section, 'Western Language empires', picks up the theme of the material book as a vector in the promotion and spreading of French, Spanish and German-based literary cultures through Europe and, in the case of the first two, across the Atlantic to south and north America. The fourth and final section concentrates on another language empire, that of English. 'The Anglophone Tradition' looks at the creation of the modern English literary canon and the way in which it was developed and defended by those working in the British Museum Library and by literary publishers in the 1920S and 1930S. As in the third section, we then broaden out geographically to look at aspects of the relationship between the material book and literary culture in the USA, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. The volume is concluded by an 'Afterword', in which David McKitterick indicates the next steps.

3

SIMON ELIOT, ANDREW NASH AND IAN WILLISON II

There is a persistent tension in literary cultures between the writer who creates and then usually wishes to control the meaning of the text, and what happens when that text gets to readers who interpret it or use it for their own purposes. There is a parallel and equally inevitable slippage of control as the writer's text is converted by some process of replication from a single copy into two or more copies. Human error or enterprise, either while copying by hand or during the transformation into print, can generate variation not only in the text itself but also in the form and context in which that text is presented to the reader. Variation in text and in the form the text takes allows, indeed promotes, the possibility of variant readings. As an agent of literary culture, the material book apparently encourages order and uniformity (by fixing texts and giving them the authority of permanence) but, in aiming to spread that authority, the text is then subject to variation and adaptation as it is physically reproduced, and as it changes under the demands of the users and the 'market', be that narrow (say a royal library or a number of monasteries) or wide (say the school market for textbooks or leisure market for novels). There is no fixed rule that links frequent copying and wide distribution to a greater number of variations in text and meaning (Sheldon Pollock gives an example of a highly stable manuscript culture in India), but such conditions certainly offer many more opportunities for diversification to take place. In some ways there is an analogy between the generation of variation in biological systems and the generation of variation in textual systems. The more frequently a species reproduces and the more widespread it is, the more opportunities it has for variation, good, bad or indifferent. Although the multiplying material book encourages greater diversity in form and interpretation, it also carries with it an ability to be cited, consulted or manipulated and thus (unlike an oral performance) offers an apparent or potential authority for each diverse reading. The possibility of spreading and diversifying textual authority - particularly when the values being promoted are religious, political or moral as well as literary - was and continues to be a challenge to any society. It creates anxieties which commonly express themselves in the desire to control access to texts, or limit the supply of texts, or govern the nature of the texts available. Formal or informal censorship is more often about controlling access to texts than about forbidding it entirely. In Europe between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries the debate was concerned with the danger of increasing access to biblical texts by translating the Latin Vulgate Bible into vernacular languages. In seventeenth and eighteenth-century Japan it was not a question of suppressing the Tale oJ Genji, simply of whether cheap editions or those with explanatory notes made it too readily available to women readers whose morals might have been corrupted by it. In nineteenth-century England the publisher Vizetelly was prosecuted not for publishing Zola, but for publishing Zola in English in a cheap form that would 4

Introduction make his texts available to all and sundry; those who published in French or those who published Zola in expensive editions were not prosecuted. The prosecution's case in the Lady Chatterley's Lover trial in 1960 expressed the fear in all too traditional a style: 'Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?'· In many more advanced societies where the state has some control over education, anxieties about the spreading impact of texts sometimes express themselves in debates about what are the appropriate levels of literacy. As Mr Flosky in Nightmare Abbey says, 'How can we be cheerful when we are surrounded by a reading public, that is growing too wise for its betters?'5 Thus text in material form has, from an apparently early stage in its evolution, prompted a strong reaction to its tendency to be multiplied and spread. Textual material has from a very early date inspired people to collect it, to concentrate it, to assemble it, to bring it into a centre, to keep it safe or keep it under control. At such centres one can compare variant texts, one can attempt to suppress or destroy those variants with which one disagrees, or to 'edit' varying texts into a standard or authoritative version. Alternatively, one might bring a host of various or fugitive texts together as an exemplary collection or as an anthology and, by doing so, give those texts a coherence and authority they would otherwise lack. The collecting or assembling instinct is a strong one and is probably associated with the human need to impose an understandable and significant order on what would otherwise be random and chaotic. It is an instinct visible, for instance, in the assembling of the chaotic distribution of stars in the night sky into constellations. Indeed, those cultures that produced the first evidence for systematic observation of the heavens were commonly those who also provided the first evidence for archives and libraries: Sumeria/Babylonia, Egypt, and China. Libraries and archives enable and encourage cataloguing, editing and historical scholarship. From such institutions we get the first evidence of catalogues such as those from Nippur dated c. 2000 BCE or the Pinakes of Callimachus compiled in the library of Alexandria in Ptolomaic Egypt in the third century BCE. 6 From such editorial processes we get the various fragments and tales of Gilgamesh transformed into a single, 'standard' version, and Homer's texts regularized for use as textbooks in the Hellenic and Roman world. In China in the tenth century CE we have the huge compendium made out of previously widely scattered texts, in the form of the Extensive records for the time of Supreme Peace. 7 Indeed, it is striking how many of these standardized or 'reconditioned' texts take the form of edited selections,florilegia, compilations or anthologies. The anthology and its variations have been a powerful textual form that has frequently ensured longterm survival for, and wide-spread access to, at least parts of ancient oral and written traditions. 8 What then tends to happen to these standardized, edited, collected or collated works is revealing. A few, such as Gilgamesh, are more likely to stay fixed and stay put because of the particular material nature of the text, but the majority spread out through time and space carrying the stamp of authority which attempts to

5

SIMON ELIOT, ANDREW NASH AND IAN WILLISON

exclude or suppress the lively variety of texts that went before. Some succeed, more or less, others get ambushed by all those forces that cannot be excluded when texts are copied and distributed, and so the process of diversification and variation resumes. It is thus not a matter simply of texts moving out from a controlling centre to a freer periphery; it is also a process in which such texts loop back and are re-codified, re-conditioned, revised in the same or another centre to be distributed once again and once again be subject to change brought about by replication and re-interpretation. The loop, in other words, is not a simple process of re-circulation, but a feedback loop which can change the form and meaning of what is re-transmitted. What we observe is a responsive and adaptive circulatory system spread over geographical space and historical time. Robert Darnton's 'communications circuit',9 and Adams and Barker's adaptation of it,'O offer models of this circulatory system as it might operate in particular cultures and at particular times. However, many of the loops, circulatory systems and circuits described in this volume span many centuries, sometimes millennia, and flow through widely different cultures and climates. There are texts, such as the Book of the Dead, with multiple anonymous authors, that start as engraved texts in tombs of kings and end up two thousand years later as a few lines on a scrap of papyrus in the graves of illiterates. There are texts, such as the Iliad, originally expensively written down for ritualistic purposes, that turn up 2600 years later as a Penguin Classic or a Hollywood film. Many binary terms have been used to describe or characterize this dance of the texts between control! uniformity and release/diversity: Centre and Periphery, Cosmopolis and Vernacularization, High Culture and Popular Culture, the patron versus the market, cultural fidelity versus cultural promiscuity, and so on. In aU these terms, and many more, the role of the material text and the material world in which it has its being is critical in determining the balance between the centripetal and centrifugal forces acting on a text. The material form of the text will determine how easy or how difficult it is to copy, whether it stays in an archive/library/palace or whether it moves along trade routes into the mark~t place, whether its creation is mostly for the public good or mostly for commerci~l profit, whether it is easy or hard to transport, whether it is cheap or expensive to buy, and how easy or how difficult it is to read. Broader material changes in society also affect the way in which, and the speed with which, the material book transmits textual matter. For instance, economic developments in twelfth-century Europe promoted trade, encouraged more of a cash economy and, in doing so, stimulated the development of universities and other book-using institutions (such as the law). This in turn radically increased the demand for books and saw a decisive shift in the location of book production from the monasteries to more secular workshops. In east and south China in the sixteenth century, silver bullion from the New World transformed the economy and created new demands for block-printed books. This saw a revival of interest in a late tenth-century editorial compilation, Extensive records, that Glen Dudbridge describes in his chapter.

6

Introduction III

Non-Western Traditions of the Book At various times the guardians of textual culture in China had been concerned to regularize, control and classify texts, and this they commonly did through state bibliographers and librarians and, in the late tenth century for instance, by the creation of an encyclopaedic compendium, Extensive recordsfor the time of Supreme Peace. Thanks to China's early development of xylography (printing using whole pages carved into single blocks of wood), this huge undertaking was assembled and printed in just a few years. It attempted to freeze the fluid mass of texts that had until that time been widely and variously spread over the country, and it did so with some success, though at the expense of variety and difference. Extensive records, in Glen Dudbridge's words, exhibited a certain 'bland editorial sameness' (a similar blandness can be detected in the standard text of Gilgamesh). The sixteenth century saw the creation of a money-based consumer society in the east and south of China which generated a new demand for textual entertainment that could be satisfied only by print culture with its ability to produce a large number of copies at a low price. This demand led to the exploitation of earlier textual resources and the revival and selective use of Extensive records. This compilation, of course, offered a rather particular version of a literary tradition, which was re-interpreted in the sixteenth century by having certain of its texts included in smaller, more thematic anthologies that were designed to illustrate or exemplify particular genres. This tradition of re-circulating old texts in new material forms - such as new anthologies - extended right into the twentieth century in China and provides an example of assembling and reassembling texts in different physical collections, each of which has been devised to promote an argument or create a canon. Reproducing a text in a new material form or in a new context is a very effective way of playing variations on its original meaning and function. Peter Kornicki reminds us that texts can be very material things. They can even be textual objects that are not meant to be read by human beings. Many texts created in the Buddhist tradition and printed in China, Japan and Korea were ritual objects. Other texts in Japan were intended for readers but took the form of a limited number of manuscripts circulated within courtly circles (a practice reminiscent of the distribution of poems by Donne and others in seventeenth-century England)." Such uses and distribution patterns tend to limit the significance of textual variations and alternative readings unless and until they become more widely distributed and read. But in the century after the cash economy promoted the re-casting of material from Extensive records in China, commercial printers and publishers were beginning to flourish in Kyoto and Edo. These 'mercantile printers' produced versions of traditional texts, such as the Tale of Genii, in a variety of editions for a very diverse market from luxury editions through to something that could be picked up for the equivalent of a single day's earnings of a carpenter. As suggested above, it is significant that

7

SIMON ELIOT, ANDREW NASH AND IAN WILLISON

diversity and accessibility of texts almost always generates anxiety in every culture. As far as the Tale of Genji was concerned, anxiety stemmed from the ways in which it might corrupt women readers who could now get easy access to it. (The novel, which was the seductively accessible text of nineteenth-century Europe, was similarly regarded as potentially a major corrupter of female behaviour and morals.) But in publishing, as elsewhere, the motives of curiosity and profit will always finally triumph over the moral anxieties of the respectable. The Tale of Genji was by the eighteenth century read extensively and read diversely as a literary source-book, a social history source-book, a literary work with a moral message, a guide to manners, and an erotic tale. Meaning multiplied by the creation of many copies, many forms and many audiences. But amid all this diversity, a new coherence emerged, a centripetal force to balance the centrifugal one: as Kornicki points out, the extensive success in many markets of the Tale of Genii established the cultural status of Japanese and marked the beginning of the decline in the importance of the Chinese language in Japanese culture. The histories of the book and literary culture in pre-colonial India and in Islamic Iran are distinct - and conspicuously so - from those of the print cultures in the Far East and in the later West. The difference is due primarily to the persistence into modern times of a highly productive and efficient manuscript culture, with thirty million manuscripts still extant in south Asia, and with a huge corpus of illustrated Shahnama manuscripts constituting, in Robert Hillenbrand's words, 'a thoroughly atypical phenomenon in the context of world literature'. This culture appears to have been indifferent to the introduction of print technology, yet nevertheless was based on a sophisticated and largely commercial system of text production and distribution - 'script mercantilism', in Sheldon Pollock's phrase, a communication system perhaps just as consequential than the later 'print capitalism'. It was characterized by a distinctive and enduring symbiotic relationship with the pre-existing oral culture. Texts were not only copied from dictation in India as well as in Iran but also diffused on a massive scale by oral performance based on a physically present manuscript book. Thus, unlike the Far East and the later West, the great literary tradition in pre-colonial India and Islamic Iran continued and preserved an oral/script genre typified by the epics, the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, the Shahnama. In Flillenbrand's words, 'as was the case with the Homeric epics there existed an elite reading public but also a mass audience for the performed text of the epic, so that it became a remarkably familiar text at all levels of society'. The pervasive material diffusion of the epics was part of what Pollock calls the first momentous event in the history of literary culture in south Asia: the invention of the Indian writing system in the third century BeE that set the stage for the creation of the original Sanskrit 'cosmopolitan culture power-formation'. The second event was the 'vernacular revolution' which saw the rise of written literary forms of the regional languages of the sub-continent, largely in conjunction with the consolidation of the regional states that succeeded the old 8

Introduction imperial formations during the early centuries of the second millennium CEo This Robert Hillenbrand sees as comparable to the effect of Firdausi's roughly Contemporary, neo-Persian Shahnama in consolidating the cultural independence of Iran within the Arabic cosmopolis. Sheldon Pollock adds the suggestion that the concept of 'cosmopolis and vernacularization' can be applied to other climactic developments in Eurasian Book History and literary culture at large, for example the invention (or at least far wider use) of writing in 400-300 BCE Rome and 'the invention of literature' C. 240 BCE, with Livy's Adaptation of Homer, etc., and the vernacular transformations in the European Latinate cosmopolis, from Alfred the Great and the Anglo-Saxon insular script system in the ninth century onwards. Indeed, vernacularization and cosmopolis can be applied to the present global situation, which might be described, somewhat paradoxically, as a new 'vernacular cosmopolis', where literature as well as publishing is being internationalized. U (The origins of its 'transnational' elements'3 may be found in the nineteenth-century mission empire and its texts discussed by Isabel Hofmeyr in her chapter.) Yet, whatever causal factors may lie behind this larger Eurasian literary-cultural history, Pollock is concerned to identify significant contrasts within his general schema. For example, in southern Asia a wide variety of the regional scripts were used not only for the later regional languages but from the beginning for Sanskrit itself, whereas a uniform Roman script was required and maintained both for Latin (as David Ganz shows in his chapter) and even for European vernacular textuality. The effect of the oral-script symbiosis on textual stability was different in India and in Islamic Iran. In India, the celebrated feats of memory, perhaps originating with the oral transmission of the Veda, ensured remarkable stability in the oral transmission of many written literary texts, such as Tulsida's celebrated Hindi Ramayana. On the other hand, as Robert Hillenbrand notes, in Iran the tradition of producing books via dictation to large groups rather than by one-to-one copying meant that given episodes of the Shahnama 'might be extended, recast or contracted at will'. Hence no two medieval Shahnama manuscripts have the same text. It was the formulaic, non-textual and non-syntactical, pictorial representations, which the illustrators introduced - in response to market pressure - into the popular episodes of the Shahnama, that effectively overrode any number of textual inconsistencies and fixed the episodes in the popular imagination, such as those that appropriated the cosmopolitan charisma of the deeds of 'Iskandar' (Alexander). Its illustrations have meant, in Hillenbrand's words, that 'so long as Iran has rulers so long will the Shahnama remain relevant to its people'. Manuscript and print culture shape the material forms of literary culture, but the relationship between the forces of production and consumption must be seen as circuitous rather than one-way. Audiences can be formed by textual initiatives but contexts of consumption can in turn shape the uses to which text is put. An example of this circuitous exchange can be found in Isabel Hofmeyr's discussion of missionary activity in Africa, which explores the reciprocal relationship 9

SIMON ELIOT, ANDREW NASH AND IAN WILLISON

between documentary print culture and indigenous cultural traditions. While prints and documents carried the status of modernity and advancement, protestant African missionaries were forced to respond to existing intellectual traditions and to experiment with different forms and fragments of text in the dissemination of their ideas. This is the reverse of the pattern seen in the tales of Gilgamesh and the texts of Homer where fragments are regularised into standard versions or textbooks. As Sydney Shep states in her chapter in this volume, 'literary imagination can be incarnated in a host of material forms, whether oral, manuscript, print or digital. Each of these forms has its own grammar, its own set of cultural assumptions, its own performative space.' The propagation of The Pilgrim's Progress by protestant missionaries illustrates this clearly. Bunyan's text was disseminated throughout Africa in a variety of forms including postcards, posters, sermons, hymns, tracts, plays, pageants and tableaux. Such 'disassembled forms' enabled the text to be taken up into African oral narrative traditions. Nevertheless, these forms still wore the markers of colonial authority. Hofmeyr cites one particular translation which concludes with an illustration that amounts to an iconic representation of the complex ways in which printed documents were incorporated into African society. In the case of Africa, oral and performance traditions have played a particularly significant role in shaping the printed text and redefining it as an object. The example of hymn-books shows how in some African forms of Christian worship the printed book can carry a form of silent authority without actually being read, used instead in a transformative way as the basis of an improvised performance. Like the curing function of Homeric texts, and the early printing of Buddhist scriptures, the text here is being used here as a ritual, rather than a reading, object. As Simon Eliot reminds us in his discussion of the Book of the Dead, the material book has always contributed to cultures other than literary ones. Both the Book ofthe Dead and the African narratives of miraculous literacy discussed by Hofmeyr bring into focus the relationship between the material and the divine. Both examples show how technologies of writing can be used to embody traditional conceptions of the sacred. The Book of the Dead was a book designed to be used not by the living in this life but by the dead in the next. Nevertheless, in its forms it, and other funerary texts, carried with it the worldly values of rank and status. Similarly, African narratives of miraculous literacy address an imagined (dead) ancestral public but, in Hofmeyr's words, interpellate that public as 'honorary subjects of modernity'.

The Western Book in History Homer's Iliad and Odyssey had their origins, as did Gilgamesh and some of the material in the Chinese Extensive records, in an oral tradition. Some time between the eighth and sixth century BeE, :Homer's epic poems were given a material existence by being committed to writing. As so often, the bringing together of diverse and fluid oral texts into a much more fixed and stable written text was 10

Introduction in part an exercise in authority or, as Christopher Carey suggests, 'a means of control'. In the case of Homer's texts this might have been a matter of a family guild of rhapsodes attempting to gain control of the text and/or the needs of festival organizers to ensure that performances within a ritual were consistent. The importance of this need to establish control is made clear by the cost of putting the text into material form. At the time when, and in the culture where, this took place there was no tried and trusted method of transforming oral literature into written literature, certainly not in the case of texts of the length of the Iliad or the Odyssey. The process was almost certainly innovatory and also, as with most technical innovations, costly. There was no market of readers whose satisfied demand would have paid this cost, or at least spread it over a reasonable number of copies. In contradistinction, at a later stage - as Homeric texts became a major educational resource - the need for many copies in a wide variety of forms became pressing. Like the Tale of Genji, Homeric texts performed many roles. To their early functions as entertainment and in ritual were added: use in writing practice, guide to good conduct and a source of information about the gods. Such essential, multi-functional texts rapidly increased in number and in form from the fourth century BCE onwards. Homer's epic poems are the most common literary text found in the rubbish heaps of Oxyrhynchus. They survive in many and various material forms: as papyrus fragments, ostraka and on writing boards. Such a demand for copies or parts of copies led to an inevitable generation of diverse and variant texts. It was the scholars working in the library at Alexandria in Ptolemaic Egypt who, from the third century BCE onwards, represented a new centralizing phase in the history of Homeric texts. They collected a substantial number of copies from What was by then a very diverse and widely spread textual tradition and out of these produced an edited, 'standard' text. The fragments of Homer surviving from a time before this new imposition of authority was complete often differ markedly from the received text as it emerged from Alexandria. '4 Perhaps the dearth of such early variants is a measure of the success of the editors in the Alexandrian library in stamping their authority on the Homeric texts that have come down to us. In passing, Christopher Carey mentions another function of Homer's texts, one related directly to their growing authority. This was their use in various forms of magic ritual. This could be for medical remedies: certain Homeric lines being spoken or written to help cure specific physical ailments. Homer's texts could be as part of a divination practice, the most common of which was sortes (lots), in which a text was opened at random and the first passage which then met the eye was assumed to have a special significance for the reader's predicament. Sortes Homericae was followed in due course by sortes Virgilianae - both writers being commonly assumed to have been divinely inspired. Christians were later to use the Bible, and the followers of Islam the Koran, for sortes. In all these cases the material nature of the book would be crucial. For instance, the ease with II

SIMON ELIOT, ANDREW NASH AND IAN WILLISON

which the text could be opened randomly might be critical to sortes, and that would be clearly easier with a codex than a roll. As with Buddhist texts inJapan, we are reminded by these uses of Homer that the material book can perform functions that are quite distinct from conveying a literary text. In terms of both quantity and quality, Carolingian book production marked the first significant expansion in European text culture since the fall of the western Roman Empire. As David Ganz makes clear, to a significant extent this was due to a revolution in the techniques of material book production. Most important was the development of Carolingian minuscule which introduced a much higher level of uniformity and standardization into book-hands. This minuscule was simple, easy to learn and employed a slanted pen angle that came more naturally to most writers than the flattened angle required by half-uncial and other earlier scripts. Its clarity and easiness, and the fact that it became the standard means of communication within a powerful political entity, the Carolingian Empire, ensured that this technical revolution spread far and wide in Europe. IS It created a new textual culture that imposed its authority on what had been, between the fifth and eighth centuries, a regionalized and disparate set of manuscript traditions. This new centralizing textual authority was also characterized by other changes in the way in which the material book was produced. Although the tradition of one scribe writing a complete manuscript did continue, more manuscripts came to be produced by collaborative groups of scribes working in monastic scriptoria. This more efficient and collective process encouraged the creation in certain monasteries of multiple copies of the same text which could then be the subject of exchange with, or presentation to, other monasteries or the court. Along with changes in production came changes in the ways in which the material text was made more accessible or explicable. Certain texts were articulated by the introduction of chapter divisions that allowed quicker and easier access to specific parts of a text, others had marginal indexes, while commentaries had marginal notes that indicated the sources of patristic quotations. Some of these changes in the presentation of the text were in part prompted by a cultural shift in the approach to Latin. As vernacular languages consolidated and expanded after the fall of Rome, Latin - and particularly the Latin written in the late Republic and early Empire - had to be taught in schools. As Ganz argues, this stimulated a huge increase in the production and distribution of grammar and other textbooks and in the provision of the sorts of glosses and indices to classical texts mentioned above. Critical to this attempt to revive classical Latinity was the recovery and replication of the classical texts themselves. In hunting out, collecting and copying an extensive range of texts from late antiquity, the monasteries of Francia performed that vital function of concentrating the disparate, and standardizing the diverse, which great libraries have always performed. However, critically and unlike many of the libraries of antiquity, the Carolingian system went further. Its new system of manuscript production with its multiple copies allowed what had been concentrated and centralized to be 12

Introduction then distributed and dispersed throughout the Carolingian empire. We might here return to our analogy between text systems and biological systems. Any species that is concentrated in only one place is vulnerable: a change in environment or climate can wipe it out. Some of the many texts housed, perhaps uniquely, in Alexandria or Byzantine Constantinople were lost for ever with the loss of the libraries that contained them.,6 In concentrating and then distributing texts, the Carolingian system greatly increased those texts' chances of survival. As David Ganz makes clear, without Carolingian text production, medieval and post-medieval literary culture would have lost virtually every Latin author except Virgil, Terence and Livy. In some ways Petrarch was an inheritor of the Carolingian tradition, though he did not necessarily know it. As Nicholas Mann reminds us, Petrarch in his travels was always on the lookout for an old monastery in which he might find a classical text stored unregarded in its library. Nor was this just wishful thinking, for Petrarch not only recovered known but also, until that time, unknown texts such as Cicero's Pro Archia. He imagined, as did many Renaissance scholars, that the most ancient manuscripts he recovered dated from late antiquity. In fact, almost all of these were Carolingian or later in origin, a vivid demonstration of the effectiveness of multiple copy production and wide distribution away from a single centre. The Carolingian minuscule in which most of these manuscripts were written was likewise assumed to be of late Roman origin, and as thus was enthusiastically taken up as a model for humanistic hands (and, later, as a model for 'roman' typefaces). As with Ashurbanipal's libraries, as with the library at Alexandria, as with the monasteries of Francia, widely-dispersed texts were brought in, 'rescued' or 'liberated' by Petrarch to form a great new collection. The striking feature about this remarkable fourteenth-century library was that it Was not owned by an institution, a prelate or a prince, but by a private scholar. Rather like the scholars in Charlemagne's court or in the monasteries of his empire, Petrarch looked both forwards and back. Using the models of Virgil, Cicero and Augustine, he part-explored and part-created the literary culture of his time and anticipated what literary cultures to come would think of his texts. He certainly had an eye fixed on posterity. His great library was not simply a set of textual tools. It, with his friend Boccaccio's collection, would become he hoped a permanent, accessible library housed either in 'some devout and pious place' or in Venice where it would, by the process of gravitational attraction that all great libraries possess, grow to rival the libraries of antiquity. But, as with the library at Alexandria, the concentration of texts was not simply a matter of passive possession. As the scholars of Alexandria edited, amended and commented on Homer and other texts, so did Petrarch react with and modify the material books that surrounded him. Mann describes how Petrarch copiously annotated many of his favourite texts in their margins, commissioned a frontispiece by Simone Martini for his Virgil, and used the leaves of other texts to record his favourite books or the sins that he had committed. We should remember that these were handwritten comments on hand13

SIMON ELIOT, ANDREW NASH AND IAN WILLISON

written books. Thus, visually, the balance between original text and the gloss on it will be markedly different from handwritten comments on a printed book. But this was a two-way process, as Nicholas Mann observes: as Petrarch marked his books, so some of his books - such as a Cicero - marked Petrarch physically. But books, of course, marked Petrarch in another and more serious way. In surrounding himself, in immersing himself, in reacting physically to the material texts, Petrarch - and more importantly Petrarch's writings - will, he seemed to claim, be able to transmit classical learning to the future even if, like the poet Silvanus, his work survives but no classical poetry makes it through to the future. Rather like Photius's Bibliotheca, the ancient material book will be relayed to the future through the current literary culture that the writer creates. Of course, he might have hoped for more: his library might have been a relay station ensuring the transmission of classical texts to posterity. But it was not to be. Having been concentrated and amended, on his death the texts were randomly re-distributed by all those centrifugal forces that operate at the breakup of any collection. Nowadays Petrarch's material texts are scattered among some of the great libraries of the world. However, his literary texts and the literary culture they contributed to stand as a record of that time when the manuscripts were concentrated in Vaucluse, Milan and Venice in the 1350S and 1360s. Whatever happened to the material texts, the literary texts he created out of them were to be disseminated widely, first by means of manuscripts and then, hugely accelerated, by print culture. This acceleration was particularly visible in the publication of an edition of Petrarch produced by the Venetian printer-scholar Aldus Manutius in 1501, aided by the author and would-be Venetian politician Pietro Bembo (1470-1547). As Brian Richardson suggests, one of the aims of Bembo in working on this edition, and other Aldus-printed books, was to encourage a standardization of the Italian language based on a select canon headed by Boccaccio for prose and Petrarch for poetry. Here another form of centralization and standardization was taking place which used the power of print to generate a sufficient number of copies of a specifically edited version which could then very quickly carry a particular text to a highly influential audience. As an active editor Bembo regularized Petrarch's text to satisfy his own principles, but then presented the text without commentary so as not to reduce its impact. The importance of editors, collators, redactors and anthologizers of the material text is here again made apparent. The standardization of the text of Gilgamesh, the creation of an authoritative text of Homer by the scholars of Alexandria, the editing and anthologizing of Extensive Records in China are but three examples of the textual power of those who come after the author but offer the authority that attaches to an apparently coherent, accessible and reliable text. As Richardson reminds us, it is significant that in much Italian literature of the sixteenth century, variants were much more likely to be the product of editors' decisions than authors' revisions. The impact of the text that Bembo edited was crucially magnified by its material form. Aldus had chosen a small format (octavo) and italic type, both of

Introduction which imitated the style of small manuscripts that were then fashionable among the Venetian elite. Aldus had initiated this series with a Virgil and it was clear that most of the texts marketed in this form would be in Greek and Latin. To include in this series writers in the vernacular such as Petrarch and Dante was to attach to them the status of classical authorities. As Simon Eliot observes, Martial had used, and Ben Jonson was to use, format - and the company the text kept - as a way of claiming an enhanced literary cultural status. But Aldus went further, and printed some of the texts on vellum, a difficult surface (because of its natural undulations) on which to print. It had its intended effect, and those particular copies became highly desirable. The process of printing, despite its obvious advantages for both the material book and literary culture, had a drawback for those wanting to sell to an influential elite: printing suggested mass production and thus undiscriminating sales to the hoi polio;. To produce high-status printed books using old-fashioned materials (such as vellum rather than paper) was a way of ridding the printed book of that hint of vulgarity - and thus of clinching a sale. However, if one Wanted to eschew the profane mob completely, then manuscript culture was the obvious one to embrace. Gutenberg's invention had made manuscript book production into a form of conspicuous consumption: it implied exclusivity, limited distribution among a discriminating few. As Brian Richardson points out, Pietro Bembo made full use of this scribal culture that ran parallel to print culture and at first distributed his sonnets exclusively by manuscript, a practice that was also commonly used in Japan to distinguish high-status versions of the Tale of Genj; at the same time. This was distribution, but of a very specific, targeted kind. . However, there is a paradox underlying these careful strategies of discriminat109 publishing. As Brian Richardson points out, one of the reasons Aldus and other printers wanted to establish a regular, standardized form of Italian was to make sure that publishers of texts in Italian would have a large enough market for their wares. Behind even the most conservative form of elite publishing is a new sort of commercial imperative brought about by printing, and this illustrates another aspect of the material world intruding into literary culture. The econOmics of printing usually means that it is very costly in terms of time, labour and materials to assemble everything required to print a book of any significant size. !he printing process is designed to produce many copies and, if it does not, then Its unit costs can be very high indeed. If, for sake of argument, one needed to produce between 500 and 750 copies of a book to bring the unit cost down to a competitive price, then that is what one had to print and to sell. This implied a large demand and thus, in most cases, a geographically extended market. Gutenberg printed a Bible, not because it was the book most in demand around Mainz (a missal in that case would have been a better bet), but because it was a book that, with its standard Vulgate text (unlike a missal or book of hours, both of which tended to have local variant texts), would sell over much of western Europe.

IS

SIMON ELIOT, ANDREW NASH AND IAN WILLISON

Aldus and others seem to have succeeded, for historians of the book observe the rise of the vernacular text and a related decline in the publishing of works in Latin during the sixteenth century in Italy. As in Japan a century later, a successfully promoted literary text in the vernacular could shift the cultural balance between a formerly authoritative language and the new arrival. As Richardson reminds us, with the rise of Italian came two very successful genres: collections of letters to be used as models for writing, and anthologies of modern poets. Collections and anthologies were both the creations of editorial activity, and this again serves to remind us of the importance of the re-packaging of older texts in new forms. In material terms a compilation, a collection or anthology acts like a relay station in that it gives old texts, or at least parts of old texts, a new chance of transmission to the future. A significant number of compilations of all sorts were designed as texts to be used in education (a tradition that is carried on into the twenty-first century by such texts as the Norton Anthologies). The Old Babylonian version of Gilgamesh was a compilation based on a set of separate Gilgamesh narratives originally in Sumerian; the Book of the Dead was an assemblage of spells and incantations; Extensive Records was a tenth-century Chinese anthology. Similarly, the Byzantine literary culture produced a range of anthologies, compilations and book-lists, some of which provide us with textual fragments of works that have otherwise been lost. Examples of these include: the Anthologion of Johannes Stobaeus (fifth-sixth century), the Bibliotheca ofPhotius (c. 820-891) and the compilation that became known as the 'Greek Anthology' whose earliest extant material form is a tenth-century manuscript found in 1606 in the Library of Counts Palatine at Heidelberg.'7 Other forms of printed compilation can be found in the almanacs and 'thick journals' of nineteenth-century Russia as described by Abram Reitblat and Christine Thomas. Literary culture had entered Russia from the Byzantine Empire in the tenth century but was expressed mostly in Church Slavonic. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries Russian literary culture would articulate itself, as far as it articulated itself at all, in French. It was only after the Napoleonic wars that the vernacular became an appropriate and patriotic means of expressing a new national consciousness. As Japanese asserted itself through the success of Tale of Genji and Italian through the publications of Aldus and others, so the Russian language found a literary vehicle to promote it: the almanac. Like Aldus's and Bembo's italic octavos, the almanacs took a very specific material form. Their format was usually 16mo which made them easily portable, they were illustrated, printed in small type on good paper and bound lavishly. They were indeed, remarkably similar to the 'Gift Books' or 'Keepsakes' that were in vogue in Britain, France and the USA in the 1820S and 1830S. As the title suggests, these were designed very specifically to be gifts, often at Christmas or the New Year, and commonly a gift that would be given by a man to a woman. They were often luxurious and expensive enough to be used as tokens of love. As with gift books, Russian almanacs were often a miscellaneous collection of texts that differed widely in quality. Their publishers would pay well enough to attract

Introduction first-rank professional writers (as they did in England: Walter Scott, Coleridge, Mary Shelley and, albeit reluctantly, Wordsworth, all wrote for gift books) but also offered the chance for unpaid and vanity authors to contribute. In both cases this popular, vernacular form helped to define and support the developing concept of the professional editor or author for, as described by Reitblat and Thomas, the material rewards for the successful writer could be substantial. Some of the texts offered were designed specifically to equip the books' readers to transmit them to other literary forms. Running parallel to the printed gift book and almanac in western Europe and Russia was the manuscript tradition of the commonplace book and the album. These required that those invited to write in them should inscribe some fragment of poetry, witty saying or profound thought before signing their names. Almanacs and gift books provided these bons mots that the reader could memorize and then later write in someone's album. Here, as elsewhere, the concentration and centralization represented by the printed anthology then promotes rather than inhibits subsequent transmission and variation. It is worth reminding ourselves again that, even after the ~ntroduction of printing into a society, manuscript culture commonly played an Important role in textual transmission. The 'thick journals' that displaced the almanacs from the 1830S onwards had no such obvious parallels in western European textual culture. As had been the case with the almanacs, thick journals, as their very name suggests, were defined by a very specific set of material characteristics. They were large, commonly Octavo rather than 16mo and could be up to 500 pages long. Their audience, though primed by the almanac, was on the whole more serious than for the earlier form, appealing particularly to 'country landowners' who may have lived very far from Moscow or St Petersburg. Distribution of any material text is obviously affected by the 'tyranny of distance'. Nevertheless, by the 1840S the postal service in Russia was capable of delivering the sort of substantial material text on which a remote reader could feed for months.

Western Language Empires !he maturing of print capitalism in western Europe and the consequent Intensification of book production, circulation, collection, and literary canon formation, introduced a major expansionist factor into the cultural and political dynamics of the region. Jean-Yves Mollier presents the French vernacular canon and its 'literary pantheon' as an agency of national glojre, and dates its origin rro m the publication of Du Bellay's DeJJense et Illustration de la langue Jranfoyse In 1549 (comparable to Bembo's Prose della lingua vulgar of 1525). Its characteristic cosmopolitan hegemony in the Europe of Le Grand Sie'cle and the Enlightenment is evident in the chapters of John Barnard, Maria Luisa LopezVidriero and Bernhard Fabian on the formation of the vernacular canons in England, Spain and Germany. However, so far as the dynamism and promiscuity of print culture is concerned, Mollier focuses on the liuerature ;ndustrielle 17

SIMON ELIOT, ANDREW NASH AND IAN WILLISON

promoted by early-nineteenth-century newspaper serialization and showman/ authors, notably Alexandre Dumas, and their exclusion from the 'pantheon' as an aspect of the emerging culture midiatique of modernity and the resulting 'cultural schizophrenia' among the elite committed, like Sartre, to les mots. This is something that publishers in the great tradition such as Gallimard have contained, albeit ambivalently, within the ambit of the canonical, with their own popular series such as Detective. In contrast to some of the chapters on the Anglophone tradition, which show the emerging creativity of peripheral literary cultures, FranlYois Vallotton notes that the creativity of the Francophone peripheries - those adjacent to France (Suisse Romande and Belgium), as well as overseas - was seriously and continuously inhibited by the imperiousness of Parisian hegemony. Liberation came only intermittently, as a result of occasional dysfunction in the Ville Lumiere itself: from the censorship of Enlightenment authors by the Ancien Regime, and their publication in the Suisse Romande and the Low Countries; to the Occupation of Paris between 1940-44, with the Quebec publishing trade becoming a haven for authors fleeing fascist Europe. As Jacques Michon suggests, this was 'an unusual situation', which brought about a literary renaissance in Qyebec. In contrast, the book trade even in Spain itself, let alone in the Spanish colonies, was for long peripheral to that of the rest of Europe because of undercapitalization and domination by imports, mainly from France, Italy and the Low Countries. Even in the Golden Age the trade was forced to rely mainly on jobbing printing and the production of traditional ephemera such as ballads as well as romances of chivalry. Nevertheless, as Clive Griffin reminds us, these local genres 'lay at the heart of Cervantes's Don Quixote' and did, therefore, contribute to the formation of a literary culture. Moreover, even when the Spanish vernacular canon was eventually formed in the eighteenth century, with technical modernization and the refinancing and restructuring of the trade, Spain, as Maria Luisa Lopez-Vidriero notes, 'was always on the periphery of the Enlightenment'. However, the systematic support of scholars, such as Mayans y Siscar, and of libraries by the new Bourbon regime contributed to the special features of Bourbon culture in Spain in a way comparable to the role played by libraries and scholarship in early imperial China or late Renaisance Italy and France. The editing of Spanish classics to new standards came out of these developments. It indicated a scrutiny of the native literary and historiographical tradition which was based partly on the conflicting French and Italian elements of the Enlightenment represented by Spanish followers of Descartes and Vico. Finally, as Jean-FranlYois Botrel demonstrates, even when the Spanish (and Portuguese) vernacular literatures moved towards globalization, with the reception of naturalism as an international literary movement, publishers and critics in Spain and Latin America were motivated more by /a mode de Paris and the sensations caused there by Zola's texts than by strict attention to the texts themselves. The tendentious translations of Zola's texts, and the sensational

18

Introduction repackaging of his works in serial and dramatic form for local purposes, rendered any substantial and significant reception of Zola problematic. Botrel cites the great contemporary critic, Clarin, that 'those who have read Zola in Castilian do not know who Zola is', and concludes that 'more than [Zola's] books themselves ... it is their day-to-day superficial treatment in the press and by critics, in tones of scandal and moral outrage, which had the most decisive influence on perceptions of what appears today [to literary historians] as a deep current and a major literary and cultural phenomenon'. The German language empire shared with the Spanish a peripheral origin vis-a-vis the French, but of a different nature. German vernacular literature, following the Thirty Years' War, lacked a national political base. Thus the creation of a German literary canon in opposition to the French by the generation of Lessing, Herder and Mendelssohn involved the creation of a whole, selfconsciously cultural - as distinct from political - nation: a 'German Republic of Letters' which, in Bernhard Fabian's words, 'could subsequently stimulate new national cultures in the centre and east of the continent'. For this, the chief initiator was Friedrich Nicolai, the publisher of Lessing and Mendelssohn, and his pioneering, inclusive Allgemeine Deutsche Bibl;othek 'transcending regional boundaries'. Nicolai's example led to a far more professional idea of the publisher than anything in the French, British or restructured Spanish book trades: ~he publisher as Kulturver/eger. With this came an almost equally professional Idea of the "'general" educated (gebj/deter) reader', leading to a distinctively ~erman reading revolution and an extended, middle-class mandarinate. There IS an analogy here with the role of a dedicated reading public in the creation of vernacular literatures in Richardson's sixteenth-century Italy, Barnard's eighteenth-century England, and Reitblat's and Thomas's nineteenth-century Russia. The subsequent stimulation of new national cultures in the relatively poor areas of central and eastern Europe by the German language and book trade was led by the newly professionalized and expansionist publishing trade association (Bijrsenvere;n) in Leipzig and its networks, which involved bookselling in all languages, subjects and periods as well as publishing; and which stretched as far as Greece and the Ukraine. It was mediated in part by what Frederic Barbier terms 'intellectual systematization', based in the research archives of Vienna, Budapest etc. Comparisons can be made here with imperial China, Alexandria and Bourbon Spain. Moreover there is the role played by distinctive social groups - denominational, aristocratic and, in particular, Jewish. The latter, denied access to the civil service, used entry into the book trade and related areas of Publicistique as a means of assimilation into the cultural nation and the modern World.

The Anglophone Tradition An understanding of what constitutes 'literary culture' depends on shared assumptions about a canon of major, influential, or representative texts. While 19

SIMON ELIOT, ANDREW NASH AND IAN WILLISON

the evolution and construction of the canon has long been a subject of scrutiny in literary studies, John Barnard argues that recent studies of the origins of the English canon have paid insufficient attention to the relationship between authors and publishers and the workings of the book trade. Barnard traces how the publisher Jacob Tonson worked closely with two influential writers, Dryden and Congreve, to create a 'clearly defined "polite" audience'. Situated at a moment of transition in the market for literary production, from an essentially court culture to the commodification of the arts, the series of literary anthologies that Tonson produced in collaboration with Dryden helped to define a readership, open up the market for new writers and set out the forms of the eighteenthcentury canon. As we have been arguing, one of the main themes that emerges from the range of essays in this volume is the significance of anthologies in the formation of literary cultures. Whether it is the encyclopaedic compendium of tenth-century China, or the almanacs and thick journals of nineteenth-century Russia, to take just two examples already mentioned, anthologizing brings coherence and authority to literary culture. The canonical power of the anthology lies in the claims it makes - implicit or explicit - to being representative; an anthology is a selection of parts but it carries with it the authority of representing a whole. Tonson's multi-volume sets of authors' Works illustrates this point. Although each set was marketed as a collection of all the works of an author, the uniform presentation of the choice of authors is itself a selection, an anthologizing that, nevertheless, carries the appearance of being a whole. Barnard's chapter also draws attention to the significance of the bibliographic code - the format, size and physical construction of the book - to the way literary cultures are established, develop and decline. Discussing Dryden's translation of Virgil (1697), the first work by a living writer published by subscription, Barnard argues that the handsomely engraved folio transcended the divisive political and religious tensions of the 1690S to create a symbolic 'English cultural achieveme nt', one that asserted the claims of English poetry to classic status. This manipulation of the cultural associations of format is comparable to Pietro Bembo's editing of Petrarch and Dante mentioned above. Two of Simon Eliot's illustrations of 'material factors in literary culture' provide further examples of the way that the format of a text can carry - indeed create - a canonical authority. Martial, in the construction of his Epigrams, not only attempted to give cultural authority to a new literary form but, in adopting the parchment codex rather than the papyrus roll for his creation, challenged the conventions of material form as well. Similarly, Ben Jonson's 1616 folio edition of his Works not only claimed a status for his writings through encasing them in a form commonly associated with classical texts, but by including nine of his plays he established the precedent for the collecting and canonizing of drama - hitherto seen as ephemeral genre - that allowed the 1623 folio edition of Shakespeare's plays to become the critical moment in the establishment of Shakespeare as the central figure in the canon of English literature. As David Scott Kastan has written, 'if 20

Introduction

Shakespeare cannot with any precision be called the creator of the book that bears his name, that book might be said to be the creator of Shakespeare'. 18 Barnard's chapter shows how closer attention to the material conditions of production and consumption can reveal the complex interaction between literary culture and readership. If Tonson's early activities helped to shape a 'polite' audience, then the transforming nature of that audience prompted further experimentations with form. Tonson's publication of multi-volume collected editions of authors' works at the beginning of the eighteenth century coincides with the extraordinary publishing phenomenon of the Tatler (17°9-1 I) and the Speetator (1711 - 12) and so represents the 'decisive point at which the "polite" audience, defined by Dryden and Tonson in the 1680s and 90S, reached out to a wider bourgeois readership'. As James McLaverty's recent study of Alexander Pope has made clear, the introduction of copyright legislation, the expansion of the market and the increasing demand for periodicals, pamphlets and journals changed the status of the author in the early eighteenth century.19 The relevance of such economic issues to the transformation of literary culture is perhaps best noted in relation to copyright. The impulse to exploit the business value of literary property not only can dictate the strategies of publishers - and therefore the nature of the market-place - but can also lead to ventures that influence new or related disciplines. Simon Eliot gives an example of this in Samuel Johnson's famous Lives of the Poets. Johnson's Lives have come to be seen as important documents in the historical development of both literary criticism and the art of biography, yet they were first published in the form of prefaces to editions of the English poets and were the direct result of an initiative on the part of booksellers to add value to existing texts through newly copyrightable material. The social and moral anxiety generated by a fear of the uncontrolled distribution of texts, which has been visible in many cultures at many times, is illustrated again in Andrew Nash's chapter on literary culture in inter-war Britain. As with Tale of Genji in seventeenth-century Japan or the publication of Zola in English in the nineteenth century, it is the portrayal of sexual experience that most seems to upset those who believe in the power of texts to corrupt morals. One of the main instruments of this censorship was an institution that features recurrently in this book: the library. However, in this chapter we are not talking about the great centralizing and editing libraries such as Alexandria; instead we are observing the circulating and subscription libraries that came to the fore in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and survived, with one exception (Mudie's, which failed in 1937), well into the 1960s. As self-appointed moral guardians they prided themselves on their literary Podsnappery; as commercial organizations, fearful of losing subscription income, they dared not take risks. Commerce and prudery thus came together to ensure that the most adventurous and risk-taking writings, a significant number of which were closely aSsociated with Modernism, were not widely distributed in Britain. This Controlling of distribution went further than the lending market and affected also part of the book retailing system. The book clubs, which in the UK had emerged 21

SIMON ELIOT, ANDREW NASH AND IAN WILLISON

in part out of the circulating libraries,'" also adopted a similarly censorious approach. Together these two distribution systems closed down the most obvious and secure means by which publishers might make a profit on their, to use Q D. Leavis's phrase, 'high-brow' texts. An alternative route to profit thus had to be used: marketing these texts in exclusive, de luxe, limited and sometimes signed editions that could charge a premium price and thus return a profit to publisher and author alike, despite modest sales. This was a variation on the system used by Aldus and Bembo in early sixteenth-century Venice, where they used the social cachet of marketing limited and expensive editions to those who were, or wished to be regarded as, the elite. One of the great literary publishers of the day, Chatto & Windus, exploited another Aldine marketing tactic: the uniform series. However, unlike its Venetian forerunner, the Phoenix Library launched in 1928 used the series to promote a range of copyright texts at a standard low price of 3S. 6d. In some ways this echoed the split marketing strategy of the nineteenth-century three-decker novel described by Eliot. Starting at an impractically high price, the novel would then be rapidly repackaged in a set of standard reprint series ending up, if it were popular enough, as a paperback priced at 6d. 6d. was, of course, the price of the first Penguin Books issued in 1935, and it is with these that Nash ends. It is an appropriate place. The expensive, narrow-cast, highbrow text (which with luck makes a profit on small sales because of its high cover price) is then transformed into a cheap, broadcast book. a • What began as a controlled centralized elite text ended up in the hands of anyone who wanted a copy and subject to whatever interpretation the reader cared to impose upon it. The chapters on Japan, Italy and Russia, among others, reveal the power of literary texts and material forms to promote national languages and literary cultures. Several of the chapters on the Anglophone tradition discuss these themes in relation to the imperial (or post-imperial) cultural centre. It is worth remarking that the British Empire was propelled more by volatile trade, emigration and evangelical mission than by formal etatisme controlled by the metropolitan centre and its hegemonie culturelle, as was the case of the French Empire. u Michael Winship provides another example of the role of copyright in fixing literary value in his discussion of Uncle Tom's Cabin. When copyright in Stowe's text ran out in 1879, the publishers printed a new edition with new prefatory material, including a bibliographical account of editions and translations of the work and a new introduction, written anonymously by Stowe herself. The editorial function enters here as a means of part-protecting the publisher's literary property but, as well as warding off potential competitors, this new edition gave cultural value to the prefatory material itself in a way that has now become commonplace in literary publishing. Rival publishers of modern reprints of classic works of English and American literature continue to use prefatory and para-textual material as their principal marketing strategy. 22

Introduction The importance of copyright to the cultural and material forms of text can also be glimpsed by Stowe's popularity in Britain, which was influenced by the absence of copyright protection for American authors. Cheap reprints of Uncle Tom's Cabin helped to spread the Uncle Tom phenomenon, and by 1878 the British Museum Library had collected 35 editions of the complete text in the original English, and another eight English abridgements or adaptations. Before 1891 there was no harmonization between British and American copyright law, and the lack of protection for British authors in America and American authors in Britain impacted not only on circulation but also on influence. There were probably as many editions of Longfellow's poems in the UK as there were of Tennyson's in the 1860s and 1870S because Longfellow's texts had a free market While Tennyson's were still protected by copyright,,3 In the other direction, the massive circulation of Walter Scott in America unimpeded by copyright protection - to say nothing of his impact in Europe - could only have contributed to the considerable influence his work had on such American authors as James Fenimore Cooper. . Winship is also concerned with the emergence of a national literature. He argues that Stowe's text helped to create a national and international legitimacy for American bookmaking and American literary culture, as distinct and independent from the influence of the British cultural heritage. Comparison can be made here with Reitblat and Thomas's discussion of the almanacs and 'thick journals' of nineteenth-century Russia which helped to disseminate a vernacular Russian literature to readers who were more accustomed to European culture in French. The example of Uncle Tom's Cabin takes us firmly into the era of 'industrial book production' or literature industrielle. Winship argues that the international Success of Stowe's novel makes it the 'first true example of the wholesale ~xportation, even globally, of an American cultural product' and, as with other mdustrially-produced cultural products, that exportation could take many forms. Stowe's text provides an example of the ways in which a book-text can become embedded in multi-media mass culture. There were 'Uncle Tom puzzles and games; plates, pottery, and figurines; spoons, lamps, and mantel screens; prints, postcards, and even muslin handkerchiefs'. This phenomenon was not unique - the merchandizing of Dickens's Pickwick Papers is an obvious comparison to make - but Uncle Tom's Cabin, like The Pilgrim's Progress in Africa, provides another example of how a text can become a non-literary object and, as a consequence, exert an even more powerful influence on culture and society as a Whole. Janet Friskney explores the growth of a native Canadian literature from the perspective of the Ryerson Press, a publishing house set up in the nineteenth century by the Methodist Episcopal Church. The history of the Ryerson Press gives another example of the creative power of the periphery and of how a ~ationalliterary culture can grow out of a localised and specialized print initiative. Established with the primary intention of explaining the doctrines of the

23

SIMON ELIOT, ANDREW NASH AND IAN WILLISON

Church and campaigning for religious equality, the Ryerson Press quickly developed a 'self-conscious Canadianism' and went on to publish a number of important works of Canadian literature. As Friskney explains, these developments were in part the result of a revision of Methodist opinion over what constituted suitable reading material, an illustration again of the extent to which the demands of reading groups can dictate the direction of print culture. The chapters on Australia and New Zealand indicate the importance of publishing and print culture not only in the establishment of indigenous literary movements and cultures but also as a contribution to wider nationalist impulses. Both Sydney Shep and John Barnes are attentive to how print culture can illuminate the 'dialectical relationship between cosmopolitanism and venacularization'. Shep's chapter on New Zealand picks up on themes raised by Barnard and Eliot by considering how bibliographic codes, specifically typography, can be seen as shaping cultural identity. The significance of the physical form of type or script in the transmission of textual culture is witnessed in David Ganz's account of Carolingian minuscule and also in Brian Richardson's discussion of the italic typeface chosen by Aldus and Bembo for their editions of classical and Italian literature in the sixteenth century. As Shep argues, typographical design does things with texts and is itself a historically situated reading practice: 'By adopting and adapting historical conventions, typographers interpret textual materials at the same time as they transmit their content.' The way in which typographical design can inflect nationalist impulses is discussed through the example of J. C. Beaglehole, who combined his active interest in labour politics with a love of typography which was nurtured in England but which was put to use to advance the cause of New Zealand cultural nationalism. Beaglehole's typographical designs for the Stateorchestrated centennial publications programme formed part of a continual 'formulating and reformulating of New Zealand through historical writing', and are seen by Shep as nothing less than a textual and visual re-definition of the nation's history, part of the capture of New Zealand's 'cultural sovereignty', John Barnes's discussion offers another example of the circuitous relationship between literary culture and the marketplace of print. Barnes looks at the contrasting ways in which Australian authors of the early twentieth century negotiated the dilemma imposed by the absence of an established publishing industry in Australia. While some writers found among London editors and publishers a 'receptivity to work from the periphery' that facilitated the emergence of an Australian literary culture, others viewed dependence on an imperial centre as 'an implicit threat to their creative integrity', The question of whether the success of 'provincial' authors in metropolitan literary and publishing centres should be seen as a concession to colonialism, or as a triumph of internationalism, is one that has also been at the heart of discussions about Scottish and Irish literary culture in the twentieth century. "4 Fran~ois Valloton's chapter on 'Publishing and literature in the French-speaking world' illustrates a similar argument in relation to another imperial power. 24

Introduction As with Barnard's discussion of seventeenth-century Britain, Barnes highlights the importance of format and distribution in the construction of an audience. Both the literary newspaper, the Bulletin, and the 'popular' paperback :Bookstall Series' of Australian publisher, A. C. Rowlandson, were instrumental 10 the emergence of forces for the indigenous production and consumption of Australian texts. Equally relevant, however, is the mediating influence of literary editors, and Barnes concludes his paper with a plea for a more open analysis of ~he material contexts of twentieth-century Australian literature, one alert to the Important relationship between Australian writers and British publishers. In this context the role of Edward Garnett is crucial. As we have noted, the role of editors, redactors and anthologizers of the material text in the formation of literary culture is one of the dominant themes emerging from this book. In COntrast, however, to the editors in the Alexandrian library or to Bembo's editing of Petrarch, to take only two examples, Garnett's role in the development of AUstralian literature lies not just in the re-presentation of existing texts by past authors but also in the direct support he gave to the production and dissemin~tion of new texts and new authors. In his prominent role in the British publish109 world in the early twentieth century, Garnett acted as a literary midwife to several Australian authors, including Miles Franklin and Barbara Baynton, two unconventional women writers who did not fit easily with the policies of local AUstralian publishers. Garnett helped such voices from the periphery to get a 'London hearing' and worked to support those writers whose works broke away from the prevailing taste in Australia for novels of imperial adventure. His achievement leads Barnes to conclude that the view that the creativity and originality of Australian writers was unappreciated and resisted by London publishers should be questioned. Michael Winship is also concerned with how a national literary culture is analysed and understood. Given the importance of Uncle Tom's Cabin to international understanding of American culture, it is surprising that the text has not been made more central to the academic study of American Literature. Winship looks closely at the treatment of Stowe in American literary histories in the twentieth century and considers the extent to which trends in the history of the book have influenced the practice of literary criticism, and vice versa. Isabel Hofmeyr also considers, in the conclusion to her paper, how a study of missiona.ry publishing in Africa can influence understanding of what might constitute literary culture in Africa. Edward Garnett's father is the subject of the chapter by Richard Landon, Which again highlights the importance to literary culture of libraries and the archive, not to mention the role of the individual in literature and publishing. The physical depository of books has always intersected with the book trade and with cultures of print, as the references to libraries in Babylonia, Alexandria, China, the Carolingian monasteries and several others among these essays attest. The chapters by Landon and Stephen Bury demonstrate how influential and Outstanding librarians and curators like Richard Garnett and A. W. Pollard

25

SIMON ELIOT, ANDREW NASH AND IAN WILLISON

have always worked closely with writers, publishers and editors. As Bury states: 'knowledge of the book trade, collectors, provenance and the fate of the objects ... were and are central to the role of the curator'. Libraries provide an arena not just for the collecting of books but for places where editors and anthologists are likely to function most effectively. Just as Petrarch's collecting of his own private library influenced the literary texts he created from the books he assembled, Garnett's acquisition policy intersected with his own wide-ranging scholarly interests; he was himself a poet, essayist, literary editor, critic and historian, story-writer and biographer. As well as advancing literary culture through his own writings, his energy and encyclopaedic knowledge was placed at the service of numerous writers as well as readers and literary critics. Equally, Pollard's contribution to the development of historical bibliography and the history of the book as academic disciplines points to the reciprocal exchange between libraries and academia in the establishment of literary culture. Just as the discipline of textual editing emerges from the collecting of Homeric texts by the scholars of the library at Alexandria, the professionalization of librarianship took place at the same time as the establishment of English literature as an academic discipline (at least in England) and the emergence of the New Bibliography. Pollard's pivotal role in both attests to the importance of the curator to the direction of the production, not just the archiving, of literary and print culture. IV

The chapters in this volume establish clearly that literary culture is crucially influenced by the nature of the material text in its material context. To return to the model of the circulatory system introduced earlier, the chapters bear witness to the reciprocal exchange between the processes of creation, production, distribution, copying and reading of texts. The - commonly collective - human desire to impose a general order and coherence on texts is as strong as the commonly individual- human desire to find particular and sometimes divergent meanings. As the centrifugal force of book production propels texts outwards, so the centripetal force of book collecting draws variant texts inwards. What was geographically dispersed becomes concentrated and allows the political, religious or cultural re-processing (such as translating, editing, censoring or anthologizing) of texts to occur. These newly authoritative versions are then relayed, re-transmitted outwards by the book production system, and so the whole process of textual re-circulation begins again. As production and distribution systems become more efficient, and as the cultures in which they operate become wealthier, so the extent and the speed of this circulatory system increases (consider, for instance, the vast industry of bible editing, translation and distribution in the nineteenth century). The reader will find that a number of features and consequences of this circulatory system recur frequently throughout the book. First, there is the significance of the physical assembling of books - in libraries, in palaces, as state

26

Introduction archives, as private collections. Such concentrations encouraged the second recurrent feature, for collections offer the opportunity for editors, redactors, anthologists and censors to reprocess texts and parts of texts into authorized or standard versions, or into anthologies or collections. These reprocessed texts then frequently go on to claim an authority, or offer a status, or present a coherence, that the original texts lacked. The creation of a canon, whether it be through an anthology or a series, is one of the consequences of this process. The reprocessing of texts also provides an opportunity to control them, and to li~it those who have access to them. Censorship is a measure of the anxiety a ?IVen culture has about the impact of books on its society. Censorship can express l~self economically, by raising the price of a book beyond the reach of those most ltkely to be corrupted by it (usually assumed to be the lower orders, women and children); legally, through obscenity acts; or physically, by book burning. Book burning, perhaps the most extreme form of literary censorship, could also be regarded as a ritual. But even ritual is closely determined by the materiality of the book. A book has to be constructed of an inflammable material (such as paper) before it will play a satisfactory role in ritualistic conflagration. The burning of Ashurbanipal's library in Nineveh simply ensured that the clay tablets inside were fired to a point at which they became extremely durable. But material texts could play more positive roles in other rituals: they could act as medicines or as foretellers of the future (though, again, the materiality of the book makes things easier or more difficult: sortes is much easier with a codex than a roll). Quite apart from increasing convenience and diversifying the ways in which books might be used, different kinds of material book have frequently carried indications of their user's social status. At various moments in time different formats have carried different levels of cultural distinction - the papyrus roll and the codex, the manuscript book and the printed book, the limited edition and the mass-produced paperback. Many chapters in this book that deal with nineteenth_ and twentieth-century matters address the subject of the cheap, massproduced book brought about as a consequence of the industrial revolution and then sold to the new mass reading public. With changes caused by various transport and communication revolutions, the distribution of large quantities of text f~om the most exclusive centres to the most remote peripheries was, by the later ntneteenth century, only a matter of months or even of weeks, and as several of these chapters show, those regions or linguistic areas that might have regarded themselves as the most peripheral, the last link in the distribution chain, could and did use the material book to turn things around and promote the growth of national literary or language cultures. At the back of all this, however, lies the ever-changing technology of the book. From clay tablets and papyrus rolls to the codex and the Carolingian miniscule, the technological forms of the book determine the particular nature of the circular process of text creation, production and consumption. In our own age we are Confronted by the World Wide Web, a re-circulatory system that allows concen-

27

SIMON ELIOT, ANDREW NASH AND IAN WILLISON

tration and distribution of texts to happen virtually simultaneously. The arrival of the electronic text raises interesting questions about the materiality of text, and about its global transmission. Certainly as a mechanism for generating textual variation it is unmatched, as it is for creating apparent authority and for spreading a plethora of interpretations.'s In that sense the Web is the Alexandrian library and the tower of Babel rolled into one. NOTES 1 2

3

4

5 6

7 8 9 10

1I

12

13

14

IS

Jonathan Bate, 'General Editor's Preface' in The Oxford English Literary History, ed. by Jonathan Bate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002- ). David Wallace, 'General Preface' in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. by David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p.xvi. D. F. McKenzie, 'Printing in England from Caxton to Milton' in The Age of Shakespeare, ed. by Boris Ford (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982), pp. 207-26. See also William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). The Trial of Lady Chatterley, ed. by C. H. Rolph (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961 ), p. 17· Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey, ed. by Raymond Wright (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 103. See Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 4, 9; and Konstantinos Sp. Staikos, The Great Libraries (London: Oak Knoll Press and The British Library, 2000), p. 67. Glen Dudbridge, Lost Books of Medieval China (London: British Library Publications, 2000). For a much later period, see St Clair, The Reading Nation, pp. 66-83. Robert Darnton, 'What is the History of Books?', Daedalus (Summer 1982), pp. 65-83. Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker, 'A New Model for the Study of the Book', in A Potencie of Life: Books in Society. The Clark Lectures 1986-1987, ed. by Nicolas Barker (London: The British Library, 1993), pp. 5-43. See Harold Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, J993)· Sheldon Pollock, 'Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History', Public Culture 12 (2000), 617-25. Homi Bhabha, 'The Vernacular Cosmopolitan', Voices of the Crossing, ed. by Ferdinand Dennis and Naseem Khan (London: Serpent's Tail, 2000), pp. 133-42. Vinay Dharwadker, 'The Internationalization of Literatures', New National and PostColonial Literatures: An Introduction, ed. by Bruce King (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996 ), pp. 50 -n Vinay Dharwadker, 'Transnational Elements in Prose Fiction', 'Transnational Elements in Poetry', New National and Post-Colonial Literatures: An Introdut·tion, pp. 65-n See L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 8. A similar 'minuscule revolution' can be seen in the Byzantine Empire in the ninth

28

Introduction century, see Scribes and Scholars, p. 52. 16 Much was probably lost during the capture and sacking of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade in 1204. 17 See Scribes and Scholars, pp. 45-69; David Diringer, The Book Before Printing (New York: Dover Publications, 1982), pp. 241-2; The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, ed. by M. C. Howatson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 39. 18 David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 78. 19 James McLaverty, Pope, Print and Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 20 See Simon Eliot, 'Bookselling by the Backdoor: Circulating Libraries, Booksellers and Book Clubs 1870-1966', in 5-1 Geniusfor Letters': Booksellingfrom the Sixteenth to Twentieth Century, ed. by Michael Harris and Robin Myers (Winchester: St Paul's Bibliographies, 1995), pp. 145-66. 21 Penguin Books performed an extraordinary and perhaps unique role in Britain in the I 940s, 1950S and I 960s. It was simultaneously a purveyor of cheap books and a publisher of canonical works (e.g. Penguin Classics, Penguin English Library); it was innovatory and it was authoritative. If one publisher could publish a risque classic such as D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, defend it successfully against a charge of obscenity and then go on to sell two million copies of it in the subsequent six weeks, that publisher was Penguin Books. 22 Ian Willison, 'Centre and Periphery in the History of the Book in the Englishspeaking World and Global English Studies', in Centre and Periphery, ed. by Wallace Kirsop (Florence: Olschki, in press). 23 Simon Eliot, 'What Price Poetry? Selling Wordsworth, Tennyson and Longfellow in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Britain', Papers of the Bibliographical Society ofAmerica, 101 (December 2006). 24 On Scotland see Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (1992, repro Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000); Cairns Craig, Out of History: Narrative Paradigms in Scottish and British Culture (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1996). See especially 'Prologue: Peripheries', pp. 11-30. On Ireland see Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995). 25 In a Google search on 12 April 2005 the first ten hits on a search for 'Kipling If' delivered ten copies of the poem. Within the ten there were seven variant texts. Most differences were in accidentals but two variants displayed changes in stanza structure.

29

SOME MATERIAL FACTORS IN LITERARY CULTURE 2500 BCE - 1900 CE

SIMON ELIOT

CENTURY AFTER CENTURY provides us with overwhelming evidence to suggest that in the past most writers - unlike many modern critics - rarely viewed their creations as abstract 'texts'. They frequently, perhaps commonly, thought of them as material objects that occupied space, weighed a certain amount, cost a specific sum - and were to be read, if they were to be read at all, by readers who might not be ideal: might be irritated, grumpy, uncomfortable or easily distracted; very common readers indeed. Such views mean that in most literary cultures a text does not stay a text for long, it rapidly becomes a book. The materiality of book history can illuminate the study of past literary cultures so vividly because it can offer 'a local habitation and a name' to even the most abstract of cultural issues. I want to illustrate this by taking three of the many means by which the materiality of books can influence, and be influenced by, the ways in which literary cultures are established, develop and decline. The first is the significance of the physical form taken by the text, that is, either the nature and construction of the book (e.g. tablet, roll, codex), or its size, or the materials from which it is made (e.g. clay, papyrus, parchment, paper). The second is the impact of the various concepts of literary property, particularly at the point when this is first formally articulated by legislation in terms of 'copyright'; that is, when it fully enters the public sphere. The third is the matter of cost and price and their significance in print culture: how much did a book cost a contemporary reader, and how did price control readers' access to a particular book?' Does the level of accessibility affect a book's cultural status? In addition, I shall make a brief reference to the commerce between high and low literary cultures; the relationship between libraries and literary culture; and the links between education texts and literary culture. Let me start with the physical form of the book. Text was of vital significance to the culture of ancient Egypt. It was not exclusively a matter of developing or Sustaining literary culture in the here and now; it was, indeed, far more important than that. It was literally a matter of life and death or, rather, of life after death. Given the uncertainty and brevity of earthly life, the Egyptians very sensibly gave greater priority to efforts to establish themselves in the eternal after-life. Being a sophisticated urban civilization that was underpinned by

31

SIMON ELIOT

agriculture, it was self-consciously reliant on the recurrent pattern of the seasons - in particular the annual flooding of the Nile which delivered new, fertile silt to replenish the fields. The Egyptians therefore tended to think of existence as being the product of a series of natural cycles.' The cyclical view of life can be rather comforting. It involves change, of course, as one season gives way to the next, but it also guarantees permanence and recurrence: spring will always come again. However, for the Ancient Egyptians such a cycle needed to be maintained by human rituals on Earth. If these were followed carefully and correctly, the cosmic cycle would ensure that the familiar pattern would be repeated again and again. At their most optimistic, the ancient Egyptians regarded an individual's death as being part of this cycle, and one which led to renewal rather than decay. The renewal promised to the carefully virtuous and cautiously pious by Egyptian religion, however, was eternal rather than temporary. Death was thus not an end, but a very important transition that had to be handled with meticulous care in order to deliver the best outcome. Though views of the nature of this transition, and the list of those who could hope to undergo it successfully, varied from period to period in dynastic Egypt, the processes that were thought to bring it about were from early times governed by religious rituals - a growingly complex sequence of acts, prayers, hymns, spells and declarations - that were enshrined in a collection of texts. Given the ancient Egyptian view of the performative nature of language, to say something was to make it true. Moreover, to write it in hieroglyphs was to enact that truth eternally.3 This gave certain texts a degree of eternal status and power in preRoman Egypt which is difficult to parallel in any other culture.· The material form these texts took, and the users they served, changed from period to period. In the fifth to eighth dynasties (c. 2450-2040 BeE) funerary texts were usually carved on the walls of burial chambers of kings and, later, of their queens - these were the so-called 'Pyramid Texts'.s Their location and their imperishable - and expensive - form (carving requires much more time and effort than writing or painting) suggests an elite text exclusively devoted to ensuring the survival of the king or his close relatives in the afterlife. However, by the First Intermediate Period (2181-2025 BeE) and the Middle Kingdom (c. 2025-1700 BeE) these ritual texts had adopted a new form and had become what are now categorized as 'Coffin Texts' (Figure I). As their modern name suggests, these were most commonly written on the wooden surfaces of coffins, though they could also be inscribed on tomb walls and have sometimes even survived in book form, that is, on papyri. Coffin Texts required neither masons nor large stone tombs, so such texts were available to a wider social range of users, including court and other officials. 6 As the physical form and surface changed, so did the texts. Although many were derived from the earlier Pyramid Texts, a number of innovations were introduced into the Coffin Texts, including in one exceptional series from Bersha in Middle Egypt, maps of, and guides to, the Underworld. 7

32

Some material Jaciol'S in literary cultul'e 2500 BCE -

Figure

T.

1900 CE

Book of the Dead on wood: coffi n text (Petrie Museum).

By the seventeenth dynasty (1660-1550 BCE) som e fun erary texts had mi grated to a new sort of writing surface: the shroud . This shift in the m aterial writing surface again seem s to have been associated with further innovations in the Content of funerary texts. This new version of the texts was given the - typically optimistic or, at least, hopeful - title of 'Formulae for going out by day'; a collection which is now better known as The Book of the Dead. s By the eighteenth dynasty (1550- J292 BCE) these texts were appearin g in a more portable form bein g written on leather or papyrus rolls placed with th e body in the burial. In other words, by this time The Book of Dead had emerged in its classic form : a series of spells, ritual declarations and hymns (each consti tutin g what is now ca lled a 'chapter' ) selected from a much larger collection, written on a papyrus roll in cursive hi eroglyphs. It was a book designed not to be used by the living in this life, but by the dead in the next. Unlike its earlier form s, The Book ofthe Dead Was common ly illustrated with vignettes, usually one allocated to each chapter.'! As it emerged in the New Kingdom, the B ook of the Dead was a highl y fl exible textua l form : bein g on portable papyr us rolls it could be produced independ entl y of, and prior to, the funerary preparation . Although all B ooks of the Dead were mad e up of selections from a ' library"O of between 165 and 200 available texts, there was commonly a core of chapters that could be found in virtuall y ever y version ." In ea rli er versions the order in which these texts mi ght be written was highl y va riabl e but, in the early to mid-seventh century B E, the sequence was finally sta nd ardi zed. A similar process of standardization, also reaching full fruition by the seventh century B E, ca n be found in the grea t parallcJ textual tradition that em erged between the Tigris and Euphrates in an area now mostl y covered by parts of Syria and Iraq . Much of S umerian , Babylonian and Assyrian cultures' textual traditions s urvive in what was the lin gua franca of the ncar East in the later second millennium B E, kkadian. In the middle Babylonian period (rou ghly the 33

SIMON ELIOT

second half of the second millennium BeE) many of the major texts, including works on divination and exorcism, were subject to, in the words of Andrew George, 'revision, organization and expansion'. U This was the equivalent of a slow editorial process whose result was, by the time Ashurbanipal's libraries in Nineveh were flourishing in the late seventh century BeE, a set of standardized texts including the standard version of Gilgamesh. [3 Unlike the Book of the Dead at the same period, these texts were enshrined in a material form - the clay tablet - that was durable and long-lasting, and was commonly intended for institutional use and storage. Once standardized and recorded in tablets, such texts, unless they were copied frequently (and from where would the demand for large numbers of copies come?), tended to remain pretty well unaltered. [4 So firmly fixed was the form of Gilgamesh, for instance, that although worship of the Assyrian gods Marduk and Ashur rose to prominence in the early first millennium BeE, the standard version was established before this happened and thus these later gods do not feature in the text. [S For good or ill the meaning of a text is subject to change through a number of processes. First, when it is copied, for each act of copying offers the opportunity for variations to be introduced intentionally or by error. Second, by distribution, because wider distribution exposes the text to more and different readers whose various interpretations will tend to diversify its meaning. Third, through time, as the text survives into later cultures which will use it for their own and probably different purposes, if they use it at all. The permanence of the clay tablet, its relative lack of portability (the standard version of Gilgamesh ran to 11-12 tablets) 16 and its storage (mostly in institutions) meant that the demand for copies was low and its distribution thin. 17 Opportunities for creating variation were thus strictly limited by the material form that the text took. In contradistinction, being a selection of texts written on papyrus, the contents of a given Book of the Dead could be tailor-made for the individual and his or her perceived needs, social status and purse. Similarly, the economic and social condition of the user could determine the book's material characteristics: for instance, the quality and size of the papyrus sheets used, the number of sheets employed to make up the roll, and the number and quality of the vignettes provided. It is clear that some Books of the Dead were produced by talented scribes on private commission, while others were manufactured on spec with gaps left for the name of the deceased to be filled in later when the text was, presumably, bought off the shelf. 18 (This form of extensive, speculative production of manuscript texts has parallels with the production of Books of Hours in northern Europe in the fifteenth century.) If some papyrus rolls were finely inscribed and lavishly illustrated, many others were written roughly and at speed with poor spacing, or with the text drastically abbreviated or squashed-in to save space. In terms of length, Books of the Dead could vary from rolls over seventy feet in length to single sheets of papyrus. In one form or another, The Book ofthe Dead was produced for and used in burials right down to the Ptolemaic period, by which time it might consist, 34

Some materia/factors in literary culture 2500 BCE -

1900 CE

at least in cheaper forms, of a single chapter. Although papyrus was the main material, individual chapters could be found inscribed on shabti figures, headrests, amulets, scarabs and ostraca. The variability in form, size and cost of Egyptian funerary texts meant that, at least in the later stages of dynastic Egypt, the material of textual culture was pretty widely distributed and could penetrate down to relatively low levels of Society. By adopting new physical forms or migrating to new materials, the book can carry literary and other cultures to communities or groups far removed from the original source of those cultures. In a culture where writing was celebrated and scribes were often of high social standing, possession of a manuscript might imply literacy and the rank that went with it. However, as with books in many other cultures, a text could also be used as a device to express aspiration rather than achievement. It may well be that not all those whose grave goods included a Book of the Dead would have been able in life to read the text that nestled next to them in death. 19 As with copies of Virgil used to foretell the future (sortes Virgilianae), or Bibles to swear on, or leatherbound volumes to decorate an eighteenth-century gentleman's library, or books bought by the yard to furnish a penthouse, the material book has also always contributed to cultures other than literary ones. Some time between the eight and seventh century BCE, much around the same time as both Gilgamesh and Book ofthe Dead were being given their final standard forms and the oral tradition of Homer was first being committed to writing, the essentially oral tradition of ancient Israel was also being written down for the first time.20 This process produced a range of texts, many of which were, much later, edited and re-shaped." Indeed, it could be argued that both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible ('ta ~t~A.ta simply meant 'the books') were a compilation of a variety of different texts created at different times in different genres which, due to a series of historical and cultural processes, were fixed and then canonized at a date significantly later than the date of their creation. To an extent this process of fixing and canonizing was the result of an interplay of literary tradition and a radical innovation in the material form of the book. To put it bluntly: neither the exact order nor the status of the books composing both the Old and New Testaments were fully settled until the large Codex became an important form of the material book. While biblical books were each written on at least one separate papyrus or (later) parchment roll, or in small pamphlet-like codexes, there was no need to put them in a fixed sequence. Before this they might simply lie on a shelf or be contained in a capsa. This would allow them to be selected and read in any order, and valued according to the individual reader or the group or sect to which that reader belonged. Those who owned or had access to some rolls or small codexes would probably not have had access to all of the books of the Bible that later became canonical. It is likely that the selection of texts to which any given reader had access would be a mixture of What were later to become canonical, of what were later to regarded as noncanonical, and of texts that have since disappeared or now only survive in frag-

35

Pigure 2 . A sma ll, pamphlet- like codex: The Unknown Gospel wri tten in Egypt c. (BL Egerton Papyrus 2).

E 100- T 50

Some materialfactors in literary culture 2500 BCE- 1900 CE ments (such as the Unknown Gospel (Figure 2) of around CE 150 now in the British Library):· However, once the texts on these separate rolls could be included in a single (but large and expensive) codex,·3 issues of what was included and what was excluded, and the order in which the included texts were presented, had to be agreed. This regularization was important to the newly-emerging Christian religion because of its textual and cultural need to establish Christ as the Messiah anticipated in the Old Testament. This was to be achieved by creating a network of references and citations to the books of the Old Testament, and this could not be done with any ease unless the collection of texts to which references were made had a stable and consistent form. For the Old Testament the sequence of books seems to have been established by the end of the first century CE:4 However, for the first four centuries of the Christian era the precise nature of New Testament canon remained to an extent uncertain. The precise sequence and timing of the emergence of what were to become New Testament texts is still a contentious matter, as is the relationship between the earliest texts and the oral tradition from which those texts first sprang. It is certainly clear from the evidence we have that by the second century CE there was a wide range of texts, many on papyrus, some poorly-written, some in the form of small, pamphlet-sized code xes, that were circulating among a number of different (and perhaps competing) groups of early Christians. Some of these texts may have been rather like the early Homeric writings, put into written form simply to provide support for a still essentially oral tradition; others may have been used for more literate purposes. However, over the next two centuries this disparate and diverse textual culture was gradually concentrated, co-ordinated, filtered and edited to a point at which, by the end of the fourth century CE, there Was something like an authoritative, reasonably coherent anthology of texts.· S This process was the result of a complicated interplay of new cultural attitudes to the text and the constraints and advantages of the new material form of the Codex that Christianity (as opposed to Judaism whose most important texts remained in roll form) had enthusiastically adopted. Thus in the first four centuries of the common era textual culture and the material book had combined to produce a new form of powerful textual and cultural authority:6 This compilation of texts was no longer 'the books', it had become 'the Book'. Marcus Valerius Martialis, Martial, was born in Bilbilis in north-eastern Spain around CE 40, but had settled in Rome by CE 64. He was to live there for the next 35 years. Like many bright, ambitious provincials he was determined to make a splash in Rome, but not through the traditional means of the law courts. His particular achievement was to have reinvigorated and re-defined the epigram as a literary form, using its concision and developing its final witty turn of thought as an instrument of social comment and satire. He could also use it as a vehicle for extravagant compliment, a useful tool for the literary man who was a dependent client, as the Roman custom was, on various wealthy patrons, including 37

SIMON ELIOT

"

'

_..I

Figure 3. A papyrus roll: The poems of Bacchylides, probably, st century (BL Papyrus 733).

BCE

the emperor Domitian.'7 Here we have an example of literary innovation, the refurbished epigram, paying its way very quickly - if only in terms of gifts and invitations to dinner. But beyond the occasional flattery of a patron, Martial's work had a potentially broader appeal to the literary culture of first-century Rome. Much literature then was still being written in the shadow of Virgil's Aeneid.'s Its imitators were frequently turgid and almost always too lon g. The brief and witty epigram, with its constant reference to contemporary life, provided for many readers a welcome relief. Martial offered an easy, quick and amusing read.

Some materialfactors in literary culture 2500 BCE- 1900 CE The assumption is that Martial would have gained most of his early income from his patrons' gifts. This would certainly have been true in the earliest part of his literary career while he was producing his first works, among which would have been the Liber Spectaculorum written to celebrate the opening of the Flavian amphitheatre, the Coliseum, in CE 80. However, once a reputation had been established, another source of income would have become available. There is some evidence to suggest that by the first century CE a bookseller might pay an established writer for the right to be the first to copy a text - what was to be called in the nineteenth century 'early sheets':9 Moving fast, a bookseller using mostly Greek slave labour could produce hundreds of copies of a brief work for sale within a few days, thus stealing a march on potential competitors. Martial clearly knew a lot about the book trade, and was prepared to take a gamble. Book I of his Epigrams, published at sometime between CE 85-88, was short, so it was easily and quickly copied. Being short it would fit into small compass, indeed into something that would probably have resembled the parchment notebooks (membranae) already used for notes and jottings in the late Republic. Not for his epigrams the dignity of the traditional papyrus roll but the everyday informality of a parchment codex: form and content beautifully matched. Cheap and cheerful and, as Martial himself adds, highly portable. In Book I there is an early example of what one might call 'product placement'. In Epigram 2 the poet directly addresses his imagined reader and advertises the advantages of the new codex form: 'You who are keen to have my books with you everywhere, and want to have them as companions for a long journey, buy these ones, which parchment confines within small leaves. Provide cylinders for great authors: one hand can hold me.'3 D Not content with convincing the reader that here is a new sort of literature in a new sort of package, Martial also wishes to clinch the deal. The writer takes the reader by the hand and leads him through the city straight to the bookseller: 'So that you may not fail to know where I am for sale, and wander aimless throughOut the whole city, with me as your guide you will be certain: look for Secundus, the freedman of the learned Lucensis, behind the threshold of the Temple of Peace and the Forum of Minerva.' Here the writer and reader, the book and the bookseller, are brought into a vivid cultural and commercial proximity on a street in first-century Rome. It was a risky business: a genre still searching for status packaged in a format associated with the trivial and the ephemeral: it was akin to issuing a first edition of a novel in Britain in the 1930S in paperback. It looks almost like a counter-cultural act, and to an extent it was. However, Martial had in fact prepared the ground for this in an earlier publication. The Apophoreta (sometimes misleadingly labelled Book XIV of the Epigrams) had been published around CE 83-85. This is a collection of two-line mottoes intended to accompany a variety of gifts given at the Saturnalia. A number of these gifts were texts, and high-status, canonical texts at that. Homer: 'The Iliad and Ulysses, foe to Priam's realm, lie together, stored in many layers of skin.' 39

SIMON ELIOT

Or Livy: 'Vast Livy, for whom complete my library does not have room, is compressed in tiny skins.' In other words, here Martial is consciously representing great canonical works as being published as parchment codexes. 31 He is using the traditional literary cultural text to dignify the upstart literary cultural form of his epigrams: old wine in new bottles. He is attempting, as many writers do in their relationships with literary culture, to have it both ways. His Epigrams are new, lively, readable and portable and yet, at the same time, share a form with the most distinguished and weighty of canonical texts. All the surviving evidence, which is not much, suggests that Martial's and Secundus's literary and commercial experiment did not succeed. 3' It was going to take another three hundred years or so and the emerging Christian canon to establish the codex first as a counter-cultural form and then as the predominant one. However, an important precedent had been set, and the literary cultural significance of the choice of physical form taken by a text had been established. One of the many late Renaissance writers to pick up the epigrammatic tradition from Martial was Ben Jonson. Indeed, some of Jonson's own epigrams were loosely based on Martial's, including 1.3 addressed 'To My Booke-Seller': Thou, that mak'st gaine thy end, and wisely well, Call'st a booke good, or bad, as it doth sell,lJ

Like some of Martial's work, this poem contains fascinating hints of how contemporary books were promoted: To lye upon thy stall, till it be sought; Not offer'd, as it made sute to be bought; Nor have my title-leafe on posts, or walls, Or in cleft-sticks [ ... ]

Jonson's Epigrams were first published in 1616 as part of his collected edition on Works issued by the bookseller William Stansby (Figure 4). This edition was a highly self-conscious, indeed, self-celebrating act on Jonson's part. It was an act that drew on values that contemporary literary culture had invested in a certain format. The Works were published in folio, a format that traditionally had been associated with canonical - commonly classical - texts. This link was reinforced by the title 'Works', a term that knowingly paralleled the Latin 'opera'. The Works contained poems and epigrams, court entertainments and masques but, much more outrageously, also reprinted nine of Jonson's plays at a time when theatre writing was regarded as a highly ephemeral, not to say a vulgar, genre. Prior to 1616 many of these plays had been published in the conventionally cheap and ephemeral form of a quarto, but when Jonson revised them for folio publication he took a model from the earliest printed editions of the works of Aristophanes and Terence in terms of scene division and lineation, and erased all references to entrances and exits. In other words, he transformed them from acting to reading texts. Martial had tried in the Apophoreta to dignify the upstart

40

rigul'c 4- Claiming hi gh literacy status: the titlc- page of the folio edition of Jonson's Works

(BL: C.39.K.9).

SIMON ELIOT

form of the codex by importing Homer and Livy into it; Jonson went in the opposite direction and dignified play texts by placing them in a high literary status form - the folio - with a price to match. But, as with Martial, the inter-penetration of literary cultural values and book forms went further than status-seeking. Jonson's material motives were subtle and long-term. The folio Works was also a sort of portfolio which both demonstrated Jonson's literary versatility and established his cultural status. It helped justify James I's decision to offer Jonson a royal annuity. In turn, the annuity helped underwrite the pretensions of the folio publication. Jonson's publication in folio also had a longer-lasting and less personal impact on literary culture. His high-risk strategy - which nevertheless paid off - created a cultural precedent which legitimized, or at least made less risky, later folio publications of other dramatists. The change in literary culture brought about by Jonson and Stansby made the First Folio of Shakespeare in 1623 and the Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647 much easier to assimilate culturally. Traditional publishing forms can act as Trojan horses in literary culture. I now want to move from format to questions of literary property and copyright; that is, to questions about economic rather than literary values. In book history one is never far away from money or, at least, one should not be far from money. Martial and Ben Jonson had to make money how and where they could, given that the modern idea of copyright was not to emerge until much later. In England the concept came in with the Copyright Act of Queen Anne in 1710. Many in the book trade assumed that the 1710 Act simply added further rights to the common law right of perpetual ownership. But it proved not to be so. Through a series of legal test cases in the 177os, it became apparent that 1710 replaced rather than added to common law rights.34 In other words, the right to own a literary property was time-limited: once the specified years had passed, the text went into the public domain and the copyright owner had no further rights in it. This rather shocking discovery led booksellers to the inevitable conclusion that there were only two ways to create continuing profits. The first was to publish new titles. The second was to invest in new editions of old texts that would then attract a new copyright. Inevitably, therefore, the pursuit of secure profits meant a significant increase in production of new editions and new titles in England in the later eighteenth century. This in turn had a profound impact on literary culture. From the 1770S onwards out-of-copyright texts could be produced legitimately, cheaply and in large numbers in an open market. This had the effect of making more obvious what in another context I have called 'cultural drag':35 the phenomenon whereby the literature owned and consumed by the majority of readers - who were not affluent - was usually a generation or more behind contemporary literature. This leads, as William St Clair has pointed out, to the Romantic poets being surrounded by readers who were better acquainted with Dryden, Pope, Thomson and Crabbe than with Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge or Shelley.36

Some materialfactors in literary culture 2500 BCE- 1900 CE When discussing literary culture we should be aware that, until quite recently in Britain at least, there has been a significant time-gap between contemporary writers and the majority of their would-be readers. Indeed, there was also a gap between what writers read and what they wrote. We should remind ourselves that much of what Jane Austen read had its origin in the early and mid-eighteenth century. The other literary cultural effect of copyright was the creation of the editorial industry, the process of adding value, copyrightable value, to an old text. And this brings me to my second Johnson. On 29 March 1777 Samuel Johnson was at prayer when he was interrupted by a deputation of three booksellers: Tom Davies, William Strahan and Thomas Cadell. They represented a conger - or a share-owning collective - of no fewer than 36 London booksellers intent on producing a new edition of the English poets to rival, indeed to sink, a Scottish edition of The British Poets then being sold in London through John Bell. The deputation proposed that, for each poet, Johnson should write a biographical and critical preface: informative, magisterial and, of course, copyrightable. What was originally intended to be a few introductory pages to each poet rapidly became something much greater. Finally, and at Johnson's urging, the prefaces were published separately as the first ten volumes of the collected ~dition between 1779-81. These volumes marked both an important shift of gear 10 the literary industry and the early stages of the creation of a self-conscious literary culture for, as Alvin Kernan has remarked, 'together the biographies gave us our first history of English letters'.37 The ending of a work's copyright could have an equally impressive effect. In the period 1890-97, just before Tennyson's poetical works began to go out of Copyright, the poet was published by just two publishers, Macmillan and Sampson Low. As soon as the copyrights expired in 1899, Tennyson's presence in the literary market was transformed. Between 1901 and 1905 he was published by no fewer than 28 publishers. In this same period his poetry was issued in no fewer than 21 named series from the 'Flowers ofParnassus' through 'Thin Paper Classics' to the 'New Century Library'. Many of these series were aimed either at self-educators in the 'world's best books' tradition or at schools by presenting themselves as textbooks. Out-of-copyright Tennyson was propelled into canonical status by being re-badged and re-packaged in more than a score of 'great works' series. The power of textbooks in the creation and policing of a literary culture should not be under-estimated. 38 . I Want to stay in the nineteenth century for my third and final approach: the 10fluence of price on the literary culture of the day. In Britain, from the early 1820S to the mid-I 890S, the high-status, eminently respectable form of the novel ~as the three-decker: that is, a novel published in three volumes at 3 IS. 6d. To IllUstrate just how inflated a price this was it is sufficient to say that 3 IS. 6d. was higher than the average weekly wage throughout the nineteenth century.39 All but the most affluent or extravagant readers thus borrowed the three-decker novel rather than bought it, and they borrowed it from commercial circulating libraries

43

SIMON ELIOT

such as Mudie's and Smith's and their provincial imitators and dependents. This arrangement apparently suited the libraries because they had a virtual monopoly . on new novels, and it suited the publishers because it gave them an easily-earned income. The large circulating libraries would expect a substantial discount from the publisher, commonly up to 50 per cent and sometimes more. However, even at ISS. the publisher was making a substantial profit. Indeed, if a publisher produced a print run of, say, 500 sets of a three-decker novel and sold most immediately to the circulating libraries, he could make a secure, rapid and effortless profit. Many a minor novelist made a precarious living, and many an unadventurous publisher established a comfortable income stream, by doing just that. It was the 'straight to video' production line of its day. The three-decker novel produced some strange distortions in the literary market. Publishers frequently informed their authors that anything less than three volumes might be a financial disaster and that they would pay much less than pro rata for a two- or one-volume novel. The sheer grinding and relentless desperation of an author required to elongate a novel to fill three volumes was vividly described in George Gissing's New Grub Street (1891). When three volumes was impossible for a writer, two novels would occasionally be yoked together in order to produce the required length. The most notorious example of this was the publication of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights in 1847; this occupied only the first two volumes, the third being taken up by Anne Bronte's Agnes Grey. Even collections of short stories could be disguised as three-deckers, Besant's and Rice's The Ten Years' Tenant and Other Stories being published as a three-decker in 1881. This mutually convenient monopoly did not usually include authors, many of whom had objections to the three-decker on both practical and aesthetic grounds. Most of all, for those popular or potentially popular novelists, the circulating library route for their first editions represented a tight bottleneck. However many sets a circulating library took of a novel, if it were in high demand there would be queue of the affluent middle class desperate to borrow it. All other, less affluent, readers would have to wait months, or more likely years, to read such novels. Here is a vivid demonstration of the economic power of libraries and publishers to impose a pattern of production and consumption on literary culture which affected the behaviour of writers, the structure and content of the novel, and the ways in which readers read. And this, we should remind ourselves, was at a time when fiction was becoming the predominant genre and certainly the most profitable. Later in the century, writers' objections to the three-decker often took the form of published attacks on the system such as George Moore's Literature at Nurse (1885) or Gissing's New Grub Street. Earlier in the century, criticism more frequently took a practical form: the attempt to subvert the three-decker by adopting different publishing strategies. The most famous was the monthly shilling parts as suggested to Dickens by the publishers Chapman and Hall. This was the mirror-image of Ben Jonson's strategy: Jonson had chosen a ponderous, 44

Some material/actors in literary wlture 2500

KENILWORTH;

BCE - 1900 CE

~.

A ROMANCJ;. IlY 'l'1J"~ AU'I'IlOR O}!~ " \vAV.~ HLEY," " IVANHOE,"

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UP 4oo.a.32).

highly respectable form to give status to his plays. Dickens took a form that had for Some time been associated with downmarket, someti mes working-class, publishing (most notably by Pierce Egan senior in Life in London (1820- 21)). By a combination of genius, determination and insuperable confidence, Dickens turned the monthly shillin g part around. He made it respectable without being stuffy, and he made it a vehicle of advertising without appearing to make it vul gar, he made it accessible without makin g it too cheap. Between Pickwick

4S

SIMO N ELIOT

F igure 6. Th e novel in 19 monthl y instalm ents: Charles Dickens, Liltle Dorril (Lo ndon: Bradbury & Eva ns, 1855-57) (BL C. 144.C.3).

Papers in 1836- 37 and Dickens's death in 1870 serious, important novels could be published in weekl y or monthly instalments without either author or reader feelin g culturally compromised (Fi gure 6). But strategies often have unintended consequences, and monthly and weekly insta lments were no exception. Dickens did not compl ete a text before serialization, indeed he was often only one part ahead of his readers. A fundamental fea ture of literary culture, the relationship between writer and reader, was thus altered in two critical ways. One, the reader's experience was elongated and controlled by th e author over a nineteenth-month period ; two, readers often fcI t able to open a dialogue with the writer in the hope of influencing plot or character as the novel unfolded . The most obviolls case of this occurred durin g the serialization of Dickens's most popular novel in terms of immediate sales, The Old Curiosity S hop (1840-4 1), during which the author was inundated with letters pleading with him not let the heroine, Little Nell , die. On this occasion he ignored the pleas. On other occasions more silent but more persllasive pressures, such as a steady decline in monthly sales fi gures, would push Dickens into changin g the plot, as he did in Marti11 Chuzzlervit (1 843-44 ). Recently, historians of readin g have been returnin g to the part- novel in an attempt to recover, as far as is possibl e, the experi ence of its first readers. Experiments with the reading of Little Dorr;t (1855- 57), for instance, have suggested that the relationship between reader and text is a significantly different one from that we are used to when readin g Dickens today.40 We shall frequently need to reconstru ct the historical readin g experience in order to help characterize the literary culture of the past.

Some materialfactors in literary culture 2500 BCE -

1900 CE

But part-serialization was a solution for relatively few novelists. For most, the rigidity and cost of the three-volume meant that it sat heavy and immovable on the first edition. Innovation, if it were to come, had to follow in the wake of that three-decker. What is striking in terms of second and subsequent editions of novels popular enough to justify them was the diversity, flexibility and social mobility of their forms. Nowadays, we are used to a successful novel having just two forms: hardback and paperback. In later-nineteenth-century Great Britain a ~uccessful novel might appear in four or five different forms within six years of Its first publication. In the 1880s, for instance, the second edition of a threedecker novel might be issued in one hardback volume at only one-tenth the price of the first edition. If this proved a success, a third edition would follow a few ~onths later. This would almost halve the price of the second edition but, more Importantly, would come out as a small, pocketable book bound usually in yellow glazed boards with a picture, frequently quite a lurid one, printed on the front cover. This was the yellowback or railway novel that was the equivalent of our airport lounge novel today. It was small enough to be slipped into a greatcoat pocket, it was cheap enough to be discarded after the journey, and even the most respectable of titles might have a come-hither cover illustration to seduce the reader. Finally, if the sales of the railway edition justified it, the novel would appear as a paperback selling at 6d., just one 1/63rd of the price of its first edition (Figure 7). This level of price elasticity is unknown in fiction publishing today. It opened up the ownership of novels to a wider and wider public and allowed a clearly middle-class text to become accessible to working-class buyers. When in the UK we talk about the 'paperback revolution' we normally mean that literary cultural transformation started by Penguin Books in 1935 and consummated by the Second World War and the postwar economy of the 1950S and 1960s. In fact, after a false start in the 1860s, the cheap paperback (selling at traditional downmarket prices of Id., 2d., 3d. and 6d.) as a means of making literature accessible to the working class buyer became a feature of the last decade of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth century, and had a remarkable impact on the generation sandwiched between the education acts of 1870 and 1902. In conclusion, I would like to bring the factors of physical from, copyright and price together and mention in passing two titles that were able to use all three to increase the social and cultural mobility of a text. For instance, the nature and expectations of literary culture at different social levels in eighteenth-, ?ineteenth- and twentieth-century England might well be illustrated by followIng the various adaptations of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, first published in 17 19, as it escaped copyright, adjusted its format, dropped its price and moved from novel, to chapbook, to children's book - and then rose again to become an undergraduate set text via the 'Penguin English Library' in the 1960s. My second and final example returns us to poetry and to collections of texts, Where we began. In 1900 Oxford University Press first published The Oxford

47

SIMON ELIOT

rigure 7. A Victorian paperback: Dicks' Sixpenny Pi(k/1lirl~ p(jpers (private collection) .

Some material fa ctors in literary culture 2500

BCE - £900 CE

rigure 8. The Oxford Book of English Verse, copies on ordinary and Ind ia paper (priv31c collection) .

Book oJ English Verse. 4 ' At th e time, its nearest rival, Pa/grave 's Golden Treasury, had been up-dated to anthologize 529 poems from the 1590S to Tennyson . Oxford's ed itor, Arthur Quiller-Couch, was able to includ e very recent poems as the Press was prepared to pay copyright fees, and thus hi s anthology, which included no fewer than 883 poem s, co uld start 350 yea rs before Palgrave and yet fini sh after the Pal grave coll ection in the late 1890s. The scope of this anthology,

49

SIMON ELIOT

which helped define the canon of English lyric poetry for a couple of generations at least, was justified by Quiller-Couch to OUP by the technology of Oxford India paper - tough, thin and light - which allowed a lot of text to be packed into a modest-sized, portable book: 'compressed in tiny skins', as Martial might have described it (Figure 8). NOTES I

2

3 4

5 6 7 8

9 10

II

12 13

14 IS 16

This is discussed in Simon Eliot, 'Never Mind the Value, What about the Price?; Or, How much did Marmion cost St. John Rivers?' in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Volume 56, Number 2 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, September 2001), pp. 160-97. John H. Taylor, Death (5 the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt (London: British Museum Press, 2001), pp. 12-16. I am most grateful to Dr Stephen Quirke, Curator of the Petrie Museum in University College London, for looking over my arguments in this section and suggesting some very useful amendments. Taylor, p. 187. However, one can find similar anxieties about the extinction of the individual in the near-contemporary textual culture of Sumer and Babylon. The fragmentary epic poem Gilgamesh, which had its origin in an oral tradition flourishing in the later third millennium BCE and first survives in clay tablet form from about 1800 BeE, was characterized by Rilke as 'das Epos der Todesfurcht' (the epic of the fear of death). See Andrew George, The Epic ofGilgamesh (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1999), p. xiii. Ancient Egypt, ed. by Stephen Quirke and Jeffrey Spencer (London: British Museum Press, 1992), p. 97. Taylor, p. 194. Taylor, p. 195. These guides to the Underworld were known as the Book of Two Ways, see Q,!lirke and Spencer, p. 98. Quirke and Spencer, p. 98. See also Stephen Q,!lirke, 'Measuring the Underworld', in Mysterious Lands, ed. by D. O'Connor and S. Quirke (London: UCL Press, 2003), pp. 161-81 Taylor, p. 196. One might argue that an available collection of texts from which a given performer, reader, celebrant or user could choose is a frequent characteristic of early, originally oral, literatures. The Book of the Dead is clearly such a case but it is likely that the Homeric poems and, indeed, the epic cycles in early Greek poetry were similarly constructed. The Judaeo-Christian Bible is a selection from a much larger collection of possible texts (including those that later found their way into the Apocrypha). For example, chapter 15, chapter 30 and chapter 125 which concerns Osiris judging the dead person by weighing his or her heart; see Quirke and Spencer, p. 99. Andrew George, p. xxiv. Jeffrey H. Tigay, 'Summary: The Evolution of The Gilgamesh Epic', in Gj/gamesh A Reader edited by John Maier (Wauconda, Illinois: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 1997), p. 4J. Andrew George, p. xxiv. Jeffrey H. Tigay, pp. 43-4. Andrew George, p. xxviii.

so

Some materialfactors in literary culture 2500 BCE- 1900 CE 17 The standard version of Gilgamesh is known from 73 manuscripts, nearly half of which (35) come from one source: the libraries of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh. See Andrew George, p. xxvii. 18 Quirke and Spencer, p. 98. There are a few exceptions to this rule, the most notable being the Papyrus of Ani, see R. 0. Faulkner, The Egyptian Book of the Dead. The

Book of Going Forth by Day. The First Authentic Presentation of the Complete Papyrus ofAni (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1994). 19 They may have been literate in the daily form of handwriting (hieratic down to 700 BCE, demotic after that) but in some cases at least it would have been difficult if not impossible for them to read the formal and, by that time, very ancient hieroglyphic text. 20 See William M. Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 191-2. 21 For instance, during the Persian period the Book of Job was given a prologue and the Psalms were divided into five parts to balance the five books of Moses: see Schniedewind, p. 193. 22 British Library Papyrus Egerton 2. 23 It has been calculated that a complete bible such as the Codex Sinaiticus would have cost about 30,000 denarii, about 30-40 times the annual wage of a legionary soldier, see Bruce M. Metzger, The Text of the New Testament, third edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. IS. 24 C. F. D Moule suggests that the Jewish canon was first firmly established at the Synod of Jamnia in A.D. 90, though this would not have been accepted by all Jewish groups, see The Birth of the New Testament, third edition (London: Adam & Charles Black, 19 81 ), p. 245· 25 Moule, p. 269. 26 Schniedewind, pp. 195-6. 27 See Peter Howell, A Commentary on Book One of the Epigrams of Martial (London: Athlone Press, 1980), pp. 1-5; Martial Epigrams, Vol. I, ed. by D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 1-4. 28 See Peter Howell's introduction to Martial, The Epigrams (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978), p. 14. 29 Howell, Commentary, p. 2. 30 The translations are, unless otherwise stated, from Peter Howell, Commentary. The reference to 'one hand' may be a joke about masturbation but, given Martial's generally disapproving views on this practice (see, for instance 9.41), and the virtual impossibility of reading a roll with one hand, one might be justified in simply treating this literally. 31 For a discussion of exactly what Martial was claiming, see C. H. Roberts and T. C. Skeat, The Birth of the Codex (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 24-9. 32 C. H. Roberts and T. C. Skeat, pp. 27-8. 33 Ben Jonson, Poems, edited by Ian Donaldson (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 8. 34 On this subject see John Feather, Publishing. Piracy and Politics (London: Mansell, 1994), pp. 81-96. 35 Simon Eliot, 'The business of Victorian publishing', in The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. by Deirdre David (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 48.

51

SIMON ELIOT

36 William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 219, 581, 611-13. 37 Alvin Kernan, Samuel Johnson (5 the Impact of Print (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 272. 38 Simon Eliot, 'What Price Poetry? Selling Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Longfellow in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-century Britain' in PBSA, Volume 100, Number 4 (New York: Bibliographical Society of America, December 2006), pp. 425-45. 39 See B. R. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), table: Labour Force 23, p. 153. 40 See Jenny Hartley, 'Little Dorrit in Real Time: The Embedded Text', Publishing History, LII (2002), 5-18. 41 See Peter Sutcliffe, The Oxford University Press: An Informal History (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 119-24.

A THOUSAND YEARS OF PRINTED NARRATIVE IN CHINA GLEN DUDBRIDGE

(Figure I) is the ground plan of a great medieval city - the Tang dynastic metropolis Chang'an. Self-evidently a creation of state power: strong perimeter walls keep out the unwanted; the palace and the imperial city impose the state's ritual and political authority from a commanding position at centre north; the inhabitants live in self-contained wards of the city, shut inside during the hours of curfew. A literature is as much a construction as a city. Just as the thoughts of ancient thinkers and the songs of ancient poets were constructed into books by their followers, so are books constructed into literatures by critics, editors, bibliographers, publishers and librarians. And for two thousand years of China's history much of that work was done by the imperial state. Long before the Tang dynasty (which held power in the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries CE), state bibliographers and librarians in China had been shaping the imperial collections into a four-square, four-part structure, giving the state's own canon of Confucian scriptures a dominant position in the scheme. All other writings - historical, institutional, geographical, philosophical, religious, specialist, technical and literary - squeezed into the other three divisions: Histories, Masters and Collections.l Books were assigned to discrete categories and sub-categories within the great plan. And while in the real city even traders in imported and exotic goods found their set, structured space in the east and west markets, so too would certain unorthodox and marginal writings find theirs in the structure of the state bibliography. The tenacity and survival power of this catalogue-based model are remarkable, and more remarkable than you would expect. Its grip on our perceptions of Chinese literature is such that even now, nearly a century after the fall of the empire, it still shapes many library collections and published rare-book catalogues, together with much writing about traditional literature. It would be hard to think of any other institution set up by imperial China which has endured so well. Yet as a representation of Chinese written culture this simple model is a crude one, and its flaws are plain to see. Just as the rectangular and symmetrical plan of Chang'an gives no insight into the rich, dynamic society which lived in that city, so too the four-part imperial bibliographies set up an obvious tension with the THIS IMAGE

53

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complex realities of book culture. Of course they privilege the Confucian texts canonized by the state, and of course they omit certain classes of writing for reasons of state policy. But even within their own terms the state bibliographies present contradictions. Certain kinds of book refuse to be securely and stably classified: successive generations of bibliographies move them about uncertainly between the main divisions as official perceptions change. The twentieth century confronted the imperial model with more fundamental challenges than that. Once the imperial state itself had collapsed in 1911, modernizing reformers during the 1920S busily legitimized masses of written culture which before had been suppressed or passed over in silence. This was also the century which gave back to us the Bronze Age oracle bone inscriptions, the medieval scrolls in the Dunhuang cave library, and manuscript finds from many

54

A thousand years ofprinted narrative in China sites in central China and central Asia. If literature is a virtual city we need a much more sophisticated urban model than medieval Chang'an to cope with what the twentieth century has given us. Old structures may serve new masters. Reusing or remodelling old buildings for new purposes goes on everywhere in the world's cities, and ancient sites may still keep their name even when redeveloped for modern uses. So too, in twentieth-century China, reusing ancient categories to carry more modern concepts has been one of the fundamental procedures of literary thinking. But around the ancient core of old cities we often see other kinds of structured plan. Wide networks of streets and blocks spread out in a different grid to give the Old Town/New Town relationship we know so well in European cities like Edinburgh or Barcelona. They bring a broader vision to ancient city sites, serving larger populations and new styles of urban living. All this found an equivalent in the book culture of twentieth-century China. The reformers of the so-called May Fourth [1919] generation and their successors took a lead from another great generation of innovators in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They set new directions and priorities, they arranged their discoveries (or freshly legitimized writings) in tangential relationships to the imperial system. Out of it all came a hybrid ground plan, but a plan still circumscribed by metropolitan boundaries. And within the plan the books of the past, whether standard classics or more marginal works, might move restlessly between different addresses. That in essence is the story I want to tell here. I have chosen medieval narrative for its fluid, ambiguous relationship with the solid structures of stateinspired bibliography; and above all for the interesting dynamics of its arrival and survival in print culture. By the tenth century China's block-print technology was well established and serving both centre and periphery. Crude popular prints of technical reference Works were on sale in the streets of the western city Chengdu' and no doubt elseWhere, while the civil powers of that age were sponsoring standard printed editions of Confucian and Buddhist canonical texts. Then, in the late decades of that century, a new unifying dynasty, the Song, affirmed its own legitimacy by redeveloping the imperial library, by pursuing a programme of standard printing projects and by commissioning a group of vast literary compilations. One of these latter was a collection of narratives. The Song emperor in 977 commissioned a 500-chapter encyclopaedic compendium to be drawn from sources described as 'unofficial histories, transmitted records, stories and commonplace books'. The editorial team used the imperial palace library freshly built up from collections of defeated regional kingdoms. It was rich in recent and contemporary literature. 3 They produced the result in a mere eighteen months: it was submitted to the throne in 978 and printed in 981 - the first entirely secular printing project ever to be commissioned by the Chinese throne. This work bears the title Extensive records for the time oj Supreme Peace+ (a reference to the title of 55

GLEN DUDBRIDGE

the emperor's current reign). It is organized by subject classification, and reflects an overall interest in topics unorthodox and marginal to public concerns. The narrative items are self-contained, varied in length, but usually quite short. In nearly every case they come with a brief source reference. Our problems begin here. During the last centuries of the manuscript age, leading up to the moment just described, a vast narrative literature circulated in China. In trying to characterize that literature I find myself compelled to use sea imagery - I think of it as fluid, restless, unstable, pervasive, irregular and rich. Above all as generically unstructured. No aspect of life in China, whether political or social, religious or secular, metropolitan or provincial, remained untouched by those waters. The stories would pass between members of society in many different forms, both oral and written; they would sometimes take shape in individual collections, then perhaps flow on into others. Many would be integrated within larger works, which might be spread unevenly around the imperial library's four-part scheme of classification. Few of them survive in direct transmission, and those that do have suffered heavily in the process. So for our knowledge of that great sea of narrative we depend heavily on the early Song emperor's five hundred chapters of Extensive records for the time of Supreme Peace. Of course we must be grateful that it has survived to endow us with such riches. But we must also recognize that it has created and imposed its own structure upon the whole, and indeed upon our own perceptions of that fluid mass. For one thing, it grips us in a textual strait-jacket. Since few other sources for medieval narrative have come down, any editorial actions of those latetenth-century compilers - whether conscious intervention or faulty transcription - often have legislative power over readers for all time. But there is more. The narrative literature of Tang China comes before us here dressed in a bland editorial sameness: tidy units of text, each headed in a uniform style, parade in orderly sequence within their assigned subject classes. Perhaps some of them had been organized like that in their source collections too, but many others had circulated as discrete items on their own, and not a few were hacked out of larger works and here randomly redistributed around the new classification. The distinctiveness of all those hundreds of source works is lost. Of course it is possible, with patience and care, to reconstruct some of them to a limited extent. But that finicky work is for textual scholars, not ordinary readers and writers. So the effect remains that the fluid and restless domain of medieval narrative passed through to the future in a pre-packaged and homogeneous form, classed and labelled by subject, transcribed and printed by bureaucratic agencies. And so too it has been read by readers and cited by scholars. But this passage to a distant future was no steady, cumulative transmission of a standard text. In fact the new collection quickly vanished from sight and from mainstream attention. The court-sponsored printing blocks were withdrawn at an early date, and centuries were to pass before the collection emerged again into full view in China. Some form of transmission was going on, of course, whether

56

A thousand years ofprinted narrative in China in manuscript or in printed form.s In the early centuries there are signs that the collection was used by other editors. 6 It gained a mention in a Korean work of 1216, and does seem to have been widely used in Korea from the fifteenth century, where modern scholars have found an edited volume of selections printed in 1462.7 But in China no known printed edition survives from before the mid-sixteenth century, and we know about earlier texts only indirectly.s This half-millenium period of latency is a most interesting feature of Chinese literary history. I am not at all suggesting that narrative activity in literary Chinese died out. Writers still produced volumes of notebooks, stories, informal biographies, legends and the like. These do have their own interest. But the massive store of medieval narrative represented in the Extensive records, destined for high prominence and something like canonical status in later times, so far played little role. For an example of what this means we can look at the case of Zhu Youdun, a prince of the Ming imperial house who lived from 1379 to 1439. He was a prolific author of plays in the northern style, and in one of them he treated a Tang story which now stands out as a supreme masterpiece of the medieval tradition. Textually it comes down to us in the Extensive records. Zhu seems to have been quite unaware of that: his source material came, he tells us in a preface, from two later and shorter collections which gave a heavily abridged version of the story. 9 All the wealth and privileges open to a Ming royal prince in the early fifteenth century don't seem to have brought within his reach the store of medieval narrative literature which might have given him a much stronger creative stimulus. In the sixteenth century this would change. Some time around the middle of the century the Extensive records for a time of Supreme Peace seems to have burst upon the scene. And the scene itself was perhaps the active force which made this happen. With the silver bullion coming into China from the New World there grew up a money economy, and the more prosperous environment, particularly in east and south China, produced a consumer society with resources to develop its tastes and amusements. This was the time when block-printing finally and decisively overtook manuscript as the broad medium of book transmission. 10 The PUblishing trade flourished at several levels - expensive prestige editions served a cultured elite in the fashionable cities of east China, while middle-range and popular prints spread out in networks from publishing centres in the east and the south. The keenly commercial book trade needed a strong supply of appealing material to publish, and found what it needed by providing for leisure and entertainment. So this was a time when illustrated editions of ballads and plays, vernacular prose epics and historical romances, popular legends and religious handbooks came pouring out. Fashionable taste cultivated these folksy forms, sophisticated writers developed their themes with wit and intellectual firepower. And when those commercial and creative energies came together, a book culture of experiment and achievement grew out of them, in some cases reaching the Western world through translation - The Journey to the West, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Golden Lotus and The Water Margin are the most

57

GLEN DUD BRIDGE

familiar titles. In terms of our city metaphor, suburbs and urban sprawl were appearing outside the walls of the metropolis - perhaps even slums. No surprise, then, that the long-forgotten Extensive records, with those thousands of remarkable tales from a period now seen as distant and romantic, should emerge into the sunlight at this time. There was a full printed edition in 1567, or rather a system of contemporary editions associated with the same editor; and this would be followed by others in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But we can see the Extensive records finding an active place in sixteenthcentury literary and publishing culture not so much from the appearance of a full printed edition as from other signs. Material from this rich source was taken up in fast-developing fashionable literary forms - drama in the lyrical southern style, accessible stories in vernacular narrative forms. And then again, derivative anthologies of medieval narrative began to be published around the same time and on through the decades to come. One of these, entitled The records of Yu Chu (a title explained below), may date from earlier than the 1567 Extensive records, though it was reprinted several times in later years. 11 It launched a practice which would shape readers' and critics' literary perceptions until our own time - the cherry-picking of particularly substantial, well-written and striking stories to form a small corpus in their own right. Such anthologizing had really begun a long time before this - something similar had been done already in the ninth century, a hundred years even before the Extensive records, for which it served as a source; but that book, called Extraordinary hearsay, was lost at an early stage, and we know it only indirectly through citation." Now, though, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries many of those same stories were revisited and placed together in new anthologies, each with their thematic focus. This is how a literature is created: these publishers and editors were consciously reshaping their readers' access to narrative texts inherited from before the tenth century, and through that of course reshaping their reading and perceptions. So far this discussion has avoided the notion of genre, and for a particular reason. My purpose is to show how genre categories are overlaid on transmitted works, read into them after the event, by the editors, publishers and cultural arbiters of later times. During the period of first creation such generic terms as we meet are so vague and loose that the imperial bibliographers and private collectors of later times keep on changing their minds about how to classify them. '3 But now, in the sixteenth century, the beginnings of generic thinking are making themselves felt. This happens subtly, and only by allusion, in the anthology title Records of Yu Chu: for Yu Chu was the name of a man of the first century CE linked to a large collection of what I have so far called 'commonplace books'. My choice of translation is probably controversial, but consciously made. The original Chinese term xiaoshuo means literally 'minor statements' and two thousand years ago stood in contrast to major documents. It was defined at that time in the first published imperial bibliography as 'created from the talk of

58

A thousand years ofprinted narrative in China streets and lanes, from hearsay on the road','4 A writer from the same period described the practitioners as 'collecting together scraps of petty talk, selecting exemplary writings from close to hand, and making short books out of them, with passages worthy of attention by which we may discipline ourselves and put OUr family in order','s (For me a perfect description of what in our tradition would be called commonplace books.) But by the sixteenth century this address in the grand city plan clearly housed different residents - including the 'substantial, well-written and striking stories' from medieval China mentioned just now. I am arguing that the mid-century anthology Records of Yu Chu signals a longterm strategic change in the way medieval narrative was and is read. Although it was followed by other anthologies whose themes reflected the tastes of that time - committed affection, moral nobility and the like - this was the collection which seems first to have prioritized a given canon of medieval tales for their narrative interest. At this point, eliding three hundred years during which publishers have reassembled, reorganized and kept in print the textual discoveries of the sixteenth century, we move forward to the twentieth. Among the literary and intellectual modernizers of the 1920S one man, known by his pen-name Lu Xun, stands out as the dominant figure. 16 He earned the status partly through his own small Corpus of sharp and ironic short stories, and partly through his willingness to articulate bold, western-inspired challenges to traditional values. But he also made important contributions to literary and art history, above all in the field of fiction - a branch of European literature admired by the Chinese intellectuals of his generation and developed throughout the twentieth century as a main vehicle of modern cultural expression. Those men and women certainly created and consumed a modern Chinese fiction in vernacular style which was experimental and new, yet they showed an equally strong interest in the vernacular masterpieces of earlier times, and in the narrative forms which lay beyond them. In this they were guided by cultural arbiters like Lu Xun,17 and encouraged by enterprising publishers. 18 Lu Xun published a university lecture-course on the history of Chinese 'fiction', now frankly co-opting the ancient term xiaoshuo for this modern purpose. 19 A group of chapters dealt with the tradition of medieval narrative which he was simultaneously rediscovering and re-editing from the pages of the tenth-century Extensive records. Those chapters and the edited anthology which followed a few years later'O have shaped our reading of medieval narrative ever since. Two more generic terms will now enter the discussion, both of them buildings in the virtual city district 'xiaoshuo'. The first is called chuanqj ['transmitting singularity']. It holds a secure, seemingly impregnable place in the history of Tang literature. Everyone knows the word, everyone is at ease with it, no one questions its generic position as the class of creative prose narratives which includes some of the most famous stories in the language. Yet I am going to question it here. The chuanqj is a modern building. It is 1920S architecture. It

59

GLEN DUDBRIDGE

was put there by Lu Xun, though he did use materials from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Medieval writers certainly did not use this word as a generic term, though one of them did use it as a title for his collection of stories." The word turns up half-a-dozen times down to the fourteenth century, without ever gaining a clear generic definition." For centuries prose stories were written, collected, catalogued and transmitted with no reference to this term, but then a sixteenth-century critic, Hu Yinglin (1551-1602), set out a scheme of narrative literature in which at last chuanqi made an appearance, and he illustrated the term with four titles that, to our modern perceptions, do fit well:3 That is what Lu Xun picked up: he adopted Hu's formulation that conscious creation of fiction first emerged in the Tang period, and out of this wrote up his three chapters on the chuanqi:4 Later in the 1920S he defined the corpus by publishing an anthology which recycled the stories already picked out in the sixteenthcentury Records of Yu Chu, with some more added in. This book, Collected chuanqi stories of the Tang and Song (1927), has determined our perceptions since then: S It has shaped the literary histories, popular anthologies, lessons in school and college that conditioned the reading experience of China throughout the twentieth century.·6 A close look at the different stories in Lu Xun's collection will actually reveal that many of them diverge startlingly from one another, both in formal and in stylistic terms:? Yet the generic title chuanqi has bound them firmly together. If we could now escape from it, the famous stories would seem more continuous with a very extensive and varied corpus of tales, and a richer and more nuanced picture of Tang narrative literature would become available to us. A second generic term, zhigua; ['recording anomalies'] presents a similar case. The phrase itself is ancient; it was used in titles of narrative collections in early medieval times; it appears significantly in a critical survey from the eighth century as a defining term which covers a large and very mixed literature of the anomalous:s So medieval writers and readers were familiar with the concept and did not hesitate to use it in various ways. But its systematic adoption as a generic term for prose anecdotes of the supernatural seems to begin, once again, with Hu Yinglin in the sixteenth century, and in the same passage in which he launched the term chuanqi (along with other categories).'9 Here too the long-term effect was decisive: the terminology was sanctioned by Lu Xun in the twentieth century and has been canonized ever since. Standard contemporary authorities on medieval narrative literature still endorse and impose these generic terms on the corpus as a whole. 30 There is an irony here. Hu Yinglin himself, the very man whose taste for vigorous generic classification has driven the behaviour of critics, publishers and readers centuries after his own time, freely acknowledged in the same original passage that his categories were not clearly distinct from one another: 'Zhigua; and chuanqi are very prone to inconsistency. Sometimes the two are both recorded in a single book. Sometimes both are present within a single item. For the moment I simply cite the most important cases.' These frank and common60

A thousand years ofprinted narrative in China sense words do not appear among the quotations from the same author formulaically cited by a hundred literary historians in modern times. Yet they do give a clue to the underlying process explored in the course of this chapter: a critic will erect his preferred categories in spite of evidence to the contrary, while his followers will show even fewer scruples in embracing them. The result has been to polarize the rich and fluid corpus of Tang narrative crudely into two broad and ill-defined categories. And why not (my students and colleagues have sometimes retorted)? What is wrong with using these terms, since they fit the case well enough? The question is easily answered: there are no rights and wrongs about such things. To say that they fit the case is simply to say that they sit comfortably with our own current way of constructing the literature. Just as a salubrious, convenient modern building is easier to live in than a medieval ruin. My point is simply that we should be aware of the temporality of the literary space we inhabit, not assume that our reading and thinking about this area of Chinese literature are eternally valid and genuinely in touch with medieval habits of mind. Those are far more elusive and complicated than we like to think. NOTES

The origins and early history of this classification are presented by Jean-Pierre Drege in Les bibliothCques en Chine au temps des manuscrits (jusqu 'au Xe siecte) (Paris: Ecole Fran~aise d'Extreme-Orient, 1991). 2 Actually recorded for 883. Reference is made to subject-matter (including divination by dreams, geomancy, astrology and lexicography), to the use of engraved blocks, and to the blotted condition of the impressions; but no indications are given as to price: Paul Pelliot, Les debuts de I'imprimerie en Chine (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1953), pp. 40-1; Thomas Francis Carter, The Invention of Printing in China and its Spread Westward, revised by L. Carrington Goodrich (New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1955), p. 60. 3 I have documented this observation in Lost Books of Medieval China, The Panizzi Lectures 1999 (London: The British Library, 2000), pp. 1-4, 12-15. I

4 Taiping guangji. S Early references which document this process down to the twelfth century are gathered in an article by Zhang Guofeng, 'Taiping guang ji zai liang Song de liuchuan', Wenxian 2002.4, 101-S, 116. 6 In addition to Zhang Guofeng's material (see previous note), the twelfth-century San dong qun xian lu, compiled in IIS4, derives certain items expressly from (Taiping) guangji: included in the 1607 supplement to the Ming Daoist Canon, repro in Dao zang (Shanghai: Hanfen lou, 1924-26), vol. 993. 7 See Zhang Guofeng, 'Han guo suo cang Taiping guangji xiangjie de wenxian jiazhi', Wenxue yichan 2002.4, 7S-85. 8 In the form of collation notes entered by hand in later printed editions. 9 I have discussed this case in The Tale of Li Wa: Study and Critical Edition of a Chinese Story from the Ninth Century (London: Ithaca Press, 1983), pp. 86-92. 10 Manuscript copying remained in practice until quite recent times. For a study of

GLEN DUDBRIDGE

II

12 13 14 IS 16 17

18

19 20

21 22

23 24 25

26

27

28

this slow and complex transition see Joseph P. McDermott, 'The ascendance of the imprint in China' in Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China, ed. by Cynthia Brokaw and Kai-wing Chow (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 55-104. Examples of these editions are listed among the holdings in the Japanese Cabinet Library: see Naikaku Bunko Kanseki bunrui mokuroku, (Tokyo: Cabinet Library, 1956), pp. 286-7· See Wang Meng'ou, Tang ren xiaoshuo yanjiu, vol. 2 (Taibei: Yiwen, 1973), with a study and reconstruction of this work, the Yi wen ji. I documented and argued this point in the third lecture of the series Lost Books of Medieval China (note 3 above), particularly on pp. 62-3. Han shu (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962),30.1745. Huan Tan (c. 43 BCE-CE 28), quoted in commentary to Wen xuan, 1869 repro of Song edn, repro Taibei 1971, 3I.9a. Zhou Shuren (1881-1936). Also by Hu Shi (1881-1936) and Zheng Zhenduo (1898-1958), the latter a vigorous promoter of the publication and study of popular literature and drama from earlier times. The Yadong Tushuguan [East Asia Library] in Shanghai published a series of reprinted vernacular novels, each provided with lengthy and scholarly introductions, between 1920 and 1940. Zhongguo xiaoshuo shi liie [A summary history of Chinese fiction], Beijing 1923. Tang Song chuanqiji [Collected chuanqi stories of the Tang and Song], 1927. The ninth-century collection Chuan qi by Pei Xing. They are listed by Cheng Yizhong, Song Yuan xiaoshuo yanjiu, ([Suzhou]: Jiangsu guji, 1988), pp. 7-8. The earliest attempt at a generic use appears to be by Tao Zongyi (c. 1316- C. 1402) in Nan cun chuo geng lu (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1959), 25.306 and 27.332. This was rejected (in relation to drama) by Hu Yinglin (1551-1602) in Shaoshi shan fang bi cong (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1958), 4I.SSS. Hu Yinglin, Shaoshi shanfang bi cong, 29.374. Zhongguo xiaoshuo shiliie, chaps 8-10, citing Hu Yinglin, Shaoshi shan fang bi cong, [3 6.486]. The appearance in 1929 of a more source-critical collection by Wang Pijiang, entitled Tang ren xiaoshuo, did nothing to marginalize the chuanqi category. And needless to say historians of Chinese literature outside China have followed them contentedly. For an influential example first published in 1950 see James R. Hightower, Topics in Chinese Literature (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, rev. edn, 1965), chap. XII, pp. 76 ff. For a second more recent example see The Columbia History of Chinese Literature, ed. by Victor H. Mair (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), chapter 33, 'T'ang tales' by William H. Nienhauser Jnr. This question needs more extended treatment to distinguish differences adequately, and to recognize similarities. One group of three stories, for instance, does seem to come from the same stable and to share a likely origin in more complex groupings of prose narrative prefaces with long verse ballads: Chang hen zhuan, Yingying zhuan and Li Wa zhuan. By contrast Zhen zhongji [Inside the pillow], classified as a fable in the 987 Wen yuan ying hua (Fuzhou ed., 1567; repro Beijing: Zhonghua, 1966), 833.7b-Ioa, represents an entirely different form and style of writing. For a translation and analysis of this passage see Glen Dudbridge, Religious Experience

A thousand years ofprinted narrative in China and Lay Society in T'ang China: a Reading of Tai Fu's Kuang-i chi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 30-42. 29 Shaoshi shan fang bi cong, 29.374. 30 The literary historian Li Jianguo, for instance, surveys the field in a book entitled Tang Wudai zhiguai chuanqi xulu [Notes and data on zhiguai and chuanqi of the Tang and Five Dynasties] (Tianjin: Nankai University Press, 1993).

MARKETING THE TALE OF GENJI IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY JAPAN PETER KORNICKI

each encountered writing and written texts in forms that had first developed in China, and the history of the book in those three societies followed a similar pattern, with the initial stimulus and the technologies of papermaking and ink coming from China. The circulation of books in east Asia during the age of manuscripts, then, was largely in one direction, from China outwards, and the thirst for new manuscripts from China was particularly stimulated by the spread of Buddhism throughout east Asia and the pressing need in Japan, Korea and Vietnam for Chinese translations of Sanskrit texts. There is no room for doubting that printing technology, too, was developed in China; this took place in the seventh century if not earlier, although as yet we only have documentary evidence to go on and no surviving printed artefacts. I We ~re, of course, talking here about wood-block printing, or xylography, but it is Important to note that the mechanical reproduction of texts was not necessarily in its origins tied to the production of texts for reading, for ritual objectives were at least as important in the reproduction of Buddhist scriptures. This new technology was transmitted to Japan and Korea in the eighth century, as surviving examples of printing in both countries testify. In both cases the printing of Buddhist scriptures was indisputably undertaken not to produce copies for reading but to fulfil ritual prescriptions.' For many centuries thereafter, printing was undertaken in Japan spasmodically, initially for purposes unconnected with reading, but from at least the eleventh century for the production of texts for reading, such as Buddhist dOctrinal works or commentaries. What is particularly striking is that almost all the texts printed were in Chinese: most of them were Buddhist texts of one sort or another, but there was also the occasional philosophical or historical work. A small number were written in Japan in the Chinese language but the overwhelming majority were texts that had originally been imported from China. Texts written in the Japanese language, meanwhile, remained for the most part embedded in a courtly manuscript tradition and were never printed until the sixteenth century. In other words, it took eight centuries after the introduction of Wood-block printing for Japanese literature to appear in print. This is anything but an impressive technological pace, and it prompts an obvious question: why the long delay in applying print to Japanese texts? Space does not allow a full JAPAN, KOREA AND VIETNAM

PETER KORNICKI

answer to this question here, but, to put it briefly, printing was undertaken almost exclusively by Buddhist monasteries to produce texts for monastic use, mostly Buddhist texts which were necessarily in Chinese. There were at this stage no commercial publishers or printers who might have tried to find a market for Japanese books. Other factors militated against the appearance of Japanese literature in print, such as the high premium placed on the calligraphic qualities of Japanese literary manuscripts, which rendered the production of calligraphically uniform printed texts unattractive, and the restricted transmission of Japanese literary manuscripts within courtly circles, which bespeaks an abiding reluctance to expose these texts to a wider public. In the early years of the seventeenth century, however, commercial publishers began to establish themselves in Kyoto and later in Edo (modern Tokyo). They were unconstrained by calligraphic considerations or by any notion that the classics should be kept from the hoi polloi, and consequently the Japanese literature of the preceding centuries was rapidly put into print, to be followed by newer forms of writing such as guidebooks, letter-writers, conduct books, cookbooks and erotica. So energetic were these mercantile printers that more titles were printed during the first couple of decades of the seventeenth century alone than had been printed over the previous five hundred years, and contemporaries inevitably found themselves using oceanic imagery and talking of floods of books. Books were suddenly ubiquitous and available to an undifferentiated public in stalls, in bookshops or from itinerant peddlers. In their new incarnation as printed and smartly bound commodities they rapidly became a commonplace part of the world visualized by block-print artists, and even appeared as kimono designs. Let us focus on one of these ancient but newly-printed texts, the eleventhcentury Tale of Genii, for it raises important questions about the new audiences for print in the seventeenth century and the impact of print on reading practices. The Tale of Genii was the creation of a woman writer known to us only by her sobriquet, Murasaki Shikibu, and by this time it was already well established as the unsurpassed masterpiece of Japanese prose literature. The emergence of female authorship in the tenth and eleventh centuries is intimately connected with the cultural prestige bestowed by men upon Chinese and the designation of the Japanese script as a 'woman's hand'. This simple fact, that the author of the Genii was a woman, was made uncompromisingly clear in frontispieces of seventeenth-century editions of the text, where we see Murasaki depicted as if she were a scholar, that is, with the reclusive setting for study and all the accoutrements of a male scholar (Figure I). On the other hand, it was this very same fact that made her text morally dubious in the eyes of some influential sinologists who considered female authorship incompatible with serious writing. This was particularly the case, for example, with Hayashi Razan (1583-1657), a scholar of formidable intellect and great political influence, who noted that tales written by women 'contain the language of sycophantic laughter and false wit and lack the means to instruct or reprove'.3 66

Marketing the tale oj Genji in seventeenth-century Japan

F igure 1. Murasaki S hikibu shown at work writing th e Tale ~rGef/ii in a pavilion besi de Lake Bi wa, where legend supposes her to have begun writing the tex t. On her right arc pil es of books shown anachronisti ca ll y in the form in which printed books usually appeared in the seventeenth century and some scrolls, which may be intend ed to represent eirher Buddhist scriptures or secular painted scroll s. The illuSln1tion comes from one of the di gests of th e Tale o/Genii, the}lini Genii sodekagami fMirror in the sleeve - Genii in twelve chapters] ( 1659).

PETER KORNICKI

Although the Tale of Genii was first put into print in the seventeenth century, these early commercial editions have routinely been ignored in Japanese scholarship because they leave something to be desired in terms of textual authenticity. However, it is undeniable that in the seventeenth century it was these first printed editions that brought the text of the Tale of Genii to vastly larger audiences than the manuscript tradition could possibly reach; moreover, through their extensive illustrations, they visualized the text for contemporary readers in ways that influenced dress, deportment, manners and so on. The bibliography of these early printed editions of the Tale of Genii is complex, and although the details do not need to be rehearsed here, it is necessary to take cognizance of the different kinds of editions appearing in the market because they were aimed at different audiences.· In the first half of the seventeenth century two technologies were used in parallel for printing: woodblock printing, which had already been in use for nearly a millennium in east Asia; and movable-type printing. The latter had been introduced in the late sixteenth century simultaneously from Europe, when Portuguese Jesuits imported a press from Macao for their missionary activities in Japan, and from Korea, where metallic movable type had been developed in the thirteenth century and widely used for printing government publications. 5 Typography was widely used in the first half of the seventeenth century, mostly in the form of wooden rather than metallic type, but it was abandoned around 1650 and thereafter block-printing was unchallenged for more than two hundred years. 6 The first four editions of the Tale of Genii, however, were printed with wooden movable type, and like most other movable-type publications they lack illustrations and the print runs were in all likelihood small owing to the instability of the wooden type: extant copies show that the type was constantly having to be reset, probably because the pieces of type sometimes split and because it was impossible with hand-cut wooden type to ensure that each piece had exactly the same dimensions. These editions were followed in the 1650S and 1660s by a number of wood-block editions, published either in Kyoto or in Edo in various sizes and to suit various pockets, all of which were illustrated extensively. We know little about print-runs in the seventeenth century, but since it is recorded that Kiyomizu monogatari (1638), which sold between two and three thousand copies, was considered a bestseller, most editions presumably sold considerably fewer, and well below the estimated maximum of eight thousand considered possible before the wooden blocks wear out.' There was, by any measure, an impressive variety of editions of the Genii simultaneously available in the marketplace by 1660. Before we jump to conclusions about expanding readership, however, we need to remember that the Tale of Genii was by 1600 a forbiddingly difficult text: the language was six centuries old and very remote from that of the seventeenth century, the courtly world was long past, and the allusive intertextuality of the text rendered it opaque and demanding. It was usually, therefore, read, or rather studied, with a teacher who was well equipped to provide an oral commentary 68

Marketing the tale of Genji in seventeenth-century Japan and help with construing the text. s These various printed editions, therefore, did nothing to reduce the need for a teacher; they made the texts accessible merely in the practical sense of making it easy to buy a copy, not in the sense of making it Possible to read the text without the guidance of a teacher. Between 1663 and 1673, however, three different editions with commentaries and notes were published (see list below), and it is at this point that we can speak for the first time of the text being made accessible in both senses. And for those :ovho could not even manage to read the text with the help of the commentary, It Was possible to take a short cut by opting for one of the innumerable digests Or condensed versions of the Genji published in the seventeenth century which offered easy access to the text without the challenge of having to deal with the rebarbative language of the original. Printed editions of the Tale of Genji in the seventeenth century Editions of the full text Four distinct movable-type editions between 1600 and 1644 (text only). l11ustrated wood-block editions appear in the 1650s-1660s: three separate editions in different sizes, each reprinted several times. Wood-block editions with commentaries Bansui ichiro [A drop from the ocean] 1663; Shusho Genji monogatari [The Tale of Genii with headnotes] 1673; KogetsushO [The moon in the lake] 1673. .

Digest editions ~enjj kokagami [Little mirror of the Genii]: 7 movable-type editions 1600-1640; 3 unIllustrated wood-block editions 1651-66; from 1657 numerous illustrated wood-block editions. JUja Genji [Genii in 10 chapters]: wood-block edition in 1650s, reprinted 3 times in 1660s. Osana Genji [Genii for kiddies]: wood-block editions in Kyoto 1661 and Edo (=Tokyo) 1672, each reprinted numerous times.

Accessible, but at what price? The most widely circulated of the editions with commentaries was Kogetsushau, and the price was high at 130 momme, but then it did consist of 62 large volumes. The cheapest editions of the digests, on the other hand, could be had for as little as 3.5 momme, only slightly more than the daily wage of a carpenter or thatcher at the time; as a digest, it was of course considerably easier to follow than the original text. There was an alternative to purchasing a copy, and that was to patronize one of the circulating libraries which were already in existence by the second half of the seventeenth century in Edo, Kyoto and most of the larger towns. 9 It is clear, then, that access to the Genji in one form or another could be had even by skilled labourers without undue expenditure. This new accessibility, however, was not necessarily to be seen as a good thing. In fact, it was precisely at this time that male scholars, particularly those of a ~inological persuasion, began to voice their concerns in public about the alarmIUgly easy availability of texts like the Genji. The consensus for a long time in

PETER KORNICKI

modern scholarship has been that these seventeenth-century scholars disdained the Genji and considered it to be morally corrupting, but the consensus is wrong: most of these scholars can be shown to have been thoroughly familiar with the Genji and to have been concerned only about one thing, and that is the effect that reading it might have on women. Take, for example, the words of the sinologist Nagata Zensai (1597-1664), writing in 1653: In this country, from the highest in the land down to officials, samurai, merchants and farmers, all educate their daughters using the Tale ofGenji. This is doubtless because they want to have them compose poetry. What possible benefit can there be in women composing poetry? People are simply accustoming women to lewd behaviour.

I.

So, as Nagata Zensai saw it, The Tale of Genji was widely considered by his contemporaries to be a suitable book to place in the hands of young women; he deplored what he saw as the purpose of reading, namely facility in poetry composition, and equated this literary consumption and creativity with lewdness, presumably reflecting his distaste for literature concerning the relations between men and women, which is of course the principal subject both of the Tale of Genji and of the courtly poetic tradition. Having established what, in his view, women should definitely not be reading, in the remainder of this passage Zensai proposed that girls be brought up instead on such early Chinese texts as the Classic of Filial Piety (Xiao jing) and the Biographies of Notable Women (Lie nu zhuan), which is a collection of exhortatory biographies rather like Boccaccio's De mulieribus claris. What he does not say here is as important as what he does say: he is not dismissive of women as readers per se, he does not object to the prospect of women reading Chinese, and he does not object to men reading The

Tale of Genji. Let us take one further example out of the many that could be chosen. Kaibara Ekiken (1630-1714) was a sinologist with an unfashionable interest in popular education. In Wazoku diJjikun [Lessons for the young in the vernacular tradition], published in 1710, he included a section on how girls should be brought up: One must be selective in what one allows young women to read. There is no harm in those books depicting the events of the past. Do not allow them to read kouta [ephemeral songs] andjoruri [recitative associated with the puppet theatre] books: they do not teach the true way of the sages and are tinged with frivolity. Moreover, one should not readily allow them to read such books as the Tales of/se, the Tale ofGenji, and their ilk, which, although possessed of a literary elegance, depict licentious behavior. II

So the problem lay not with the text itself but with how women might read it. The moralists made no attempt to ban publication of the text, although systems of censorship were coming into play at this time, but what they did do was to recommend alternative reading for women; and that alternative reading consisted of Chinese works of a kind thought morally suitable for women readers. This was itself remarkable, for literacy in Chinese had hitherto been a

Marketing the tale o/Genii in seventeenth-century Japan male preserve, at least in theory if not always in practice; now, however, women were actually being urged to read Chinese, because of the perceived lack of other morally suitable reading matter. What is not remarkable, of course, is the anxiety we see here about the consequences of rising female literacy and the availability of printed books. In Elizabethan England Roger Ascham and Thomas Salter were similarly worried by what they called the 'filthie love' and 'abominable fornications' in the printed texts available to women; and of course in the nineteenth century anxiety about what women were reading was commonplace. 12 The significance of the Japanese case, however, is that the work that is provoking such concerns is nothing other than the perceived masterpiece of the Japanese literary tradition which was itself written by a woman. We have seen what the moralists thought. Did women follow their advice, though? The quick answer is 'no', for most of the moralists were responding to a problem they had observed rather than one they had anticipated: women were already reading the Genji and men were worried. That women readers were already a factor in the book market is clear from the booksellers' catalogues which listed all available titles under a variety of categories: from 1670 one of those categories was 'books for women'. The books listed in that section include both Chinese moralistic books for women and Japanese books on etiquette and behaviour, but not, however, Japanese literature, not even the Genji. But this does not mean, of course, that women were not reading books like the Genji, and as the seventeenth century came to an end there were growing efforts to justify women's reading of the Genji and other Japanese literary texts. Some male intellectuals, for example, defended it on moral grounds: 'In the way that it portrays the lives of people as they existed in this world, The Tale of Genji encourages good and discourages evil. Those who fail to appreciate the author's intention as such - instead calling the novel a guide to indecent behavior - are not even Worthy of contempt,' one argued.'3 A similar line was taken by the editors of the commercial commentaries, who anticipated female readers and cautiously offered a morally acceptable reading strategy. Female readers of the Genji who have left us their views likewise considered the text to be morally beneficial, rather than damaging. Take Nonaka En (1660-1725), a provincial woman doctor at the end of the seventeenth century; she was the author of a guide to behaviour for a woman acquaintance who was soon to marry, in which she bemoaned the fact that young women paid less attention to the books that could teach them valuable moral lessons than they did to hair-styles and fashion; she recognized that the Chinese models of womanhood contained in the Chinese works recommended by the sinologists might be unattractive to Japanese women and considered instead the 'gentle Japanese ways' found in The Tale of Genji a more appropriate model. '4 Here we see the emergence of a new approach to the Genji, as a source of models of womanhood from within the Japanese tradition. This line was pursued by numerous authors and publishers in the course of the eighteenth century: tracts for women actually recommended reading the Genji

71

PETER KORNICKI

and other works of classical Japanese literature precisely because they were perceived to offer models of behaviour and sociability, and publishers began listing such works in lists recommending beneficial books for women to read. I5 By this time, if not well before, commercial publishers were perceiving women readers as an important market for editions of Japanese literature as well as for books of a more didactic nature as well as poetry, conduct-books and so on: this is clear, from the inclusion of the new category 'women's books' in the booksellers' catalogues, from the proliferation of titles containing one or more characters specifying women readers and from advertising explicitly directed at women readers. In the complete absence of publishers' autobiographies or even publishing archives from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there is little we can say about the conscious commercial motives at work here. A further indication of the growth of the female market for books is the ubiquitous figure of the reading woman in art, including both paintings and block-prints (Figure 2). Reading is presented as an activity not restricted to the high-born but indulged in by courtesans and women of all classes, and used even for professional purposes by female doctors and cooks. But 'reading' is far too imprecise a term to cover the variety of reading strategies and possibilities that we can detect by the early eighteenth century. Let me here risk a reductive approach and attempt to identify some of the reading strategies that were being applied to the Genii and to other classical texts. I. It is undoubtedly the case that the Genii retained its potential as a literary source-book for creative intertextuality, especially in poetry composition where knowledge of the Genii could be virtually taken for granted. Every would-be practitioner of court poetry needed knowledge of the Genii, and this was already a long-established way of reading the text well before the start of the Tokugawa period (1600-1868). 2. It also served as a historical source for (male) historians and scholars. Hayashi Razan, for example, who disdained fiction, especially if written by a woman, nevertheless knew the Genii well as a social historian. 3. It could be read as a literary work with a moral message as argued by its defenders in a direct riposte to those who asserted that it was an immoral work; this was the value attributed to reading the Genii by editors and women readers like Nonaka En. 4. It was also presented as a source of knowledge of etiquette, serving as a visual and textual source of a recommended femininity that derived from an imagined past. One example of this is Onna Genii kyokun kagami [Women's Genji mirror of instruction] (1713). This not only validates female reading in an illustration which depicts a widow with a pile of books, it also includes a summary of the plot of the Geni; and offers a range of information about the composition of waka (court poetry), perfumes and other pursuits. 5. Finally, it could also be read as a sexually-charged text implicated with the 'pleasure quarters' (i.e. brothel districts). Numerous erotic versions of the Genji were published in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as Genji

Marketing the tale of Genji in seventeenth-century Japan

rl t~~· ~1~ {~A1 ~

Figu re 2. The ncarer figure 1.0 the viewer is a courtesan who is reading in relaxed pose shunnin g the forma l reading- stand at the back . The other figure is a sa murai, as is clear from the hilt of hi s sword behind him and the shaven patch on his sca lp. The illustration comes from a book by Tlishikawa Moronobu, /m(/.yfi mnRuI'II. 1~)I{jIJ/l fPillow- screen for modern times I, which was published in the early 1680s.

73

PETER KORNICKI

on 'iroasobi [Amorous Genji fun] (168 I); and Yoshiwara Genii goiuyongimi [Fiftyfour Genji Yoshiwara courtesans] (1687), a guidebook to the courtesans of the Yoshiwara brothel district of Edo, made the connection shockingly explicit by adopting the conceit of assigning a courtesan to each chapter of the Genii. All these various reading strategies, bar the first one, depended for their existence on the liberation of the Genji from the system of manuscript transmission and instruction that had imprisoned it for centuries, a liberation that was effected not solely by print but also by the provision of commentaries and other exegetical material that brought this difficult text within reach. The anarchy of reading practices that ensued aroused profound unease in the seventeenth century and provoked the attempts to control women's reading that I have mentioned above, but in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries such voices are infrequently met with: both the autonomy of reading practices and the freedom of commercial publishers to mould and exploit the market were rarely questioned. It was only in the late nineteenth century, after the transformations following Meiji Restoration of 1868 and under the impact of utilitarian and nationalistic conceptions of reading attributed to European societies, that new attempts were made to curtail that autonomy and restrain those freedoms under much more rigorous censorship systems and an education system focused on the interests of the state.• 6 What significance, then, did the printing of the Tale of Genii in seventeenthcentury Japan have? In the first place, by rendering the text more accessible and provoking unease it unwittingly highlighted the question of what women should read in a society that had already accepted the principle that women might read; the question was always what, rather than whether, women might read. It cannot be claimed, however, that the printed editions of the Genii replaced the manuscript traditions. On the contrary, the prestige attached to finely executed calligraphic copies was one of many factors - others being evasion of censorship and the desire to prevent the uncontrolled circulation of a given text - that underpinned a continuing tradition of manuscript production up to the midnineteenth century. Nevertheless, print did put the Genji and other texts into the hands of the anonymous public and released it from earlier interpretative strait-jackets. Finally, the printing of the Tale of Genii and a whole host of other literary and historical texts in Japanese in the early years of the seventeenth century marked the beginning of the end of the Chinese domination of print in Japan, leading to the gradual Japanization or vernacularization oflearned culture in Japan and the decline of Chinese as a learned language. NOTES I

2

T. H. Barrett, 'The Feng-tao k'o and printing on paper in seventh-century China', Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 60 (1997), pp. 538-40. Mitchiko Ishigami-Iagolnitzer, 'Les Hyakumanto-darani et les debuts de la xylographie au Japon (VIIIe-XIIe siecle)', in Le livre et l'imprimerie en extreme

74

Marketing the tale of Genji in seventeenth-century Japan

3

4

5

6

7 8 9

10 II

12

13

14 15

16

Orient et en Asie de sud, ed. by Jean-Pierre Drege, Michiko Ishigami-Iagolnitzer and Monique Cohen (Bordeaux: Societe des Bibliophiles de Guyenne, 1986), pp. 163-85. Kokubun chushaku zensho, 20 vols (Tokyo: Kokugakuin Daigaku Shuppanbu, 190710), vol. 13, p. 1 (separately paginated). For the bibliographic details, see Shimizu Fukuko, Genii monogatari hanpon no kenkyu (Tokyo: Izumi Shoin, 2003); Yoshida Kaichi, Eiribon Genii monogatari ko, 3 vols, Nihon shoshigaku taikei 53 (Musashi-murayama: SeishOdo shoten, 1987); and Andrew L. Markus, 'The World of Genji: Perspectives on the Genii Monogatari', in draft papers for the 'Representations of Genii Monogatari in Edo period fiction' conference (1982). Son Pogi, Hanguk e kohwalja, new edition (Seoul: Pojinjae, 1987); this book also bears the title Early Korean Typography and is partly in English. P. F. Kornicki, 'Block-printing in seventeenth-century Japan: Evidence from a Newly Discovered Medical Text', in Print areas: Book History in India, ed. by Abhijit Gupta and Swapan Chakravorty (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), pp. 227-41. (Kinsei bungaku kimanbon sosho) Kanazoshi-hen (Tanba: Yotokusha, 1947), p. 51. Ii Haruki, ed., Bansui ichiro, in Genii monogatari kochU shUsei (Tokyo: Omsha, 198892), vol. 28, p. 413. For the prices, see the details given in the contemporary booksellers' catalogues: (Edo iidal) Shorin shuppan shoiaku mokuroku shusei, 4 vols (Tokyo; Shidii Bunko, 1962-4), vol. 2, pp. 164,189; for the wages, see Ono Takeo. Edo bukkaiiten (Tokyo: Tenbasha, 1979), pp. 207, 451-2; on circulating libraries, see Nagatomo Chiyoji, Kinsei kashihon'ya no kenkyti (Tokyo: Tokyodo Shuppan, 1982), pp. 19-32. Nakamura Yukihiko, Kinsei bungei shichOko (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1975), pp. 26-7· Ekiken zenshu 8 vols (Ekiken ZenshU Kankobu, 1910-11), vol. 3, p. 217; translation from G. G. Rowley, Yosano Akiko and The Tale of Genji (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2000), p. 31. W. A. Wright, ed., Roger Ascham: English Works (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 231; Suzanne W. Hull, Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English Booksfor Women 1475-1640 (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1982), pp. 71-5; Patrick Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). Nihon shiso taikei, 67 vols (Tokyo; Iwanami Shoten, 1970-82), vol. 39, pp. 431-3; passage translated by Patrick Caddeau in Haruo Shirane, ed., Early Modern Japanese Literature: an Anthology, 1600-1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), PP·3 61 - 2 • Oboroyonotsuki, in Nihon kyoikushi shiryo, 9 vols (Tokyo: Monbusha, 189C>-92), vol. 5, pp. 699-701. For example, the lists included in Asakura Haruhiko, Kinsei shuppan kokoku shusei, Shoshi shomoku shiriizu 11,6 vols (Tokyo: Yumani shobo, 1983), vol. I, pp. 355-8, and Edo bunko: Die Edo Bibliothek, ed. by Ekkehard May, Martina Schonbein and John Schmitt-Weigand (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2003), p. 134. On censorship in the late nineteenth century, see Peter Kornicki, The book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Earliest Times to the Nineteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 358-62.

75

LITERARY CULTURE AND MANUSCRIPT CULTURE IN PRECOLONIAL INDIA SHELDON POLLOCK

I

H A V E BEE N ASK E D to provide a grand view of the world of literary culture in south Asia. It is a vast and complicated world, most probably the longest-lived continuous multi-language literary culture we have, and one whose materialities are only now beginning to be explored. I The task is a challenging one, then, but it is a critical challenge, since a number of the generalizations about the world we are prone to accept on the basis of a rather thin slice of human experience in the West are likely to be unsettled or at least complicated. In the last several decades scholarship on the invention, diffusion and eventual triumph of print culture has had a considerable impact on the writing of literary, social and even political history. Even scholars like me who do not concern themselves with the study of modernity except in so far as it requires a counternarrative of the pre-modern, cannot have escaped the arguments of Benedict Anderson, Roger Chartier, Elizabeth Eisenstein and the rest. Today the question is no longer whether or to what degree print changed the world; it is only how it did so, how 'increased circulation of printed matter transform[ed] forms of SOciability, permit[ted] new modes of thought, and change[d] people's relationship with power' - with the clear implication that such relationships, modes and forms had never changed before, or at least never so profoundly.' My problem with this literature is not just that, for a region like India, the obsession with print falls victim to the tiresome colonialism-invented-everything syndrome, whereby all that has been consequential in the last two centuries - the idea of vernacular language, or caste, or supralocal political sentiment - is supposed to have resulted from the confrontation with colonial modernity. More worrisome is that in looking for phenomena familiar from elsewhere we not only inevitably find what We are looking for but in the process often fail to see what is actually there. An alternative case could certainly be argued, that the event which was truly historic for literary cultures in India and defined them in the peculiar contours they often still bear, was the invention, diffusion and eventual conquest of manuscript CUlture, in its specific symbiotic relationship with the antecedent oral culture. The epistemic revolution of literacy, the production of manuscript books (over thirty million manuscripts are still extant), their dissemination in often massively reproduced and relatively stable form and, perhaps most important, their oral performance before large audiences over long periods of time, have had an effect

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on shaping imagination, sociality and power that is arguably deeper and more extensive than any attributable to print, middle-class book consumption (stunningly low in India), or the culture of private reading reinforced by print (though hardly generated by it). The case could be argued, I say, but has never been. It has astonished me to realize, as I have come to realize during the course of research on science and scholarship in India 1500-1800, how few sustained analyses are available of the core dimensions of manuscript culture in the subcontinent, aside from old-style text criticism. 3 Almost no detailed work has been done on the time-space matrix of text diffusion, that is, how quickly, how far and along what routes a text was circulated, and what relationship the resultant spatio-temporal map bears to the genre in question and its language. It is not that we don't have data to get some answers to these questions; rather, the questions have simply not been raised. What I aim to do in this short essay is to outline what I see as key developments and try to formulate good questions to ask of them.· Prior to the arrival of printing with missionary and colonial expansion, the history of literary culture in south Asia was shaped by two momentous events: (I) the invention of the Indian writing system in the third century BCE, setting the stage for the creation of the Sanskrit cosmopolitan culture-power formation, and (2) the vernacular revolution of the early centuries of the second millennium CE, associated with the newly consolidated regional kingdoms. (The expansion of Persianate culture in India from about 1000 CE onward added remarkable new resources but did not introduce any morphologically new dimension to literary culture.) These two events are more closely related than might be assumed. The vernacular revolution, as I have tried to make sense of it, consisted in the breakthrough to literary writing in what were called the 'languages of Place' (desa-bhasa) , which, self-evidently, only the earlier event could have made possible. At the same time, the practices of orality, which elsewhere in the world have typically been threatened if not eradicated by the inauguration of writing, have maintained themselves in India as both fact and ideal; the continuing valorization and cultivation of oral performance would inflect literary culture in uniquely Indian ways into the modern period. That said, literary culture in south Asia was actually constituted by a manuscript culture that, in its material and economic aspect, was also specific to the subcontinent. These themes - the interplay of the oral and the written; the materiality of manuscript culture; what might be called script-mercantilism - along with the peculiar mix, discernible throughout, of a dynamism that was measured and considered, and a stasis that may have been less a sign of deficiency than a sort of cultural strategy, form the armature of the following survey. I. THE ORAL AND THE WRITTEN

The inaugural moment of writing in south Asia and its impact on Sanskrit literary culture are crucial to understanding long-term developments, and there-

Literary culture and manuscript culture in precolonial India fore merit at least brief notice. Scholars have long debated the origins of writing in India, but a new consensus has recently emerged locating the invention in the chancery of the Maurya king Asoka around 260 BCE (a late invention, viewed from the Near East or China). The purpose of the invention of the script, now known as brahmi,s was to promulgate the royal edicts of the king, partly in imitation of the imperial model known from the Achaemenids, rulers of the Persian empire that extended into present-day northern Pakistan. The distribution of Asoka's edicts around the subcontinent, from northern Afghanistan to southern Karnataka, ensured that brahmi would become the foundation of every script in south Asia and of most scripts where south Asians travelled, including inner Asia (e.g. Tibetan), and south-east Asia from Burma to Champa and as far as Java6 - further evidence of the monogenetic rather than polygene tic character of Indian literacy: it was invented in one place and diffused from there throughout the sphere of Indic cultural influence. The new consensus on the invention of writing carries two implications pertinent to the concerns of this essay, one concerning old forms of memory, the other concerning new forms of literary culture. The first implication is that all textual traditions of pre-Asoka India were completely oral, and thus that the feats of Indian memory, of which earlier scholars were so often incredulous, were real and consequential. The vast corpus of liturgical texts known as the Veda, and even portions of its exegetical tradition, were transmitted without the use of writing and in exceptionally stable form, deriving largely from the belief that the texts were metaphysically efficacious only if exactly reproduced. The mnemonic proclivities involved here marked many areas of non-liturgical culture, too, such as the stable oral performance of written literary texts. It has also become clearer that Vedic communities knew about writing but chose to ignore it. Panini, the Sanskrit grammarian of the fourth or fifth century BCE who lived in Taxila in today's northern Pakistan within the power-ambit of the late Achaemenids, was certainly aware of writing (in Aramaic), but chose to make no use of it. Here is the first of a number of what appear to be conscious refusals of technology marking the history of literary and manuscript culture in India, in this case due to characteristic satisfaction with suitably sophisticated oral practices. The cultivation of memory that was central to the Vedic tradition (and imitated, as much was imitated, by other religious traditions, including Theravada Buddhists and Jains) would continue to be valued as a core cultural attainment in both the performance and the ideology of textual culture long after that culture had been completely permeated by literacy. Thus in the seventh century CE the pre-eminent scholar of Vedic hermeneutics reasserted, in writing, of course, that learning the Veda from a concrete text-artefact - 'by means Contrary to reason, such as from a written text' - could never achieve the efficacy of the Veda learned in the authorized way, 'by repeating precisely what has been pronounced in the mouth of the teacher'. Such a valorization of memory left clear traces in secular written culture. A story instructive about such memory as well as its peculiar relation to writing is told of the early-eleventh-century poet 79

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Dhanapala: enraged that his patron, King Bhoja, demanded to be made the hero of his new romance narrative, the Tilaka-manjari, Dhanapala destroyed the work by burning its single manuscript before Bhoja's eyes - an act that makes sense of course only if the text had come to be seen as identical with the written textartefact. But the poet's daughter had committed the entire work to memory (its modern edition runs to 250 closely printed pages), and so could reconstruct it in toto. In addition to the continuing valorization of memory far into the age of literacy, the oral performance of literature, typically on the basis of a memorized text or, more often, of a physically present manuscript-book, would characterize Indian literary culture into the modern period. 7 The second implication of the new consensus is that what Indians called 'literature', kavya (as it was named first in the Sanskrit tradition, spreading thence to all southern Asian languages, e.g. kakawin in Javanese), was a new cultural form in post-Asoka India. Although the fact is not always acknowledged in Western scholarship, it was writing that made kavya historically possible at all; pragmatically, 'kavya' was the name given to a literary text that was written down and transmitted primarily in written form - indeed, the text was the kind it was, in complexity, magnitude and variety, precisely because it was written down. The Indian intellectuals who theorized kavya as an expressive, imaginative, formally ordered type of language use, while saying little about its written embodiment, understood full well that it was a historically new type. The history of the text of Valmiki's Ramayana, which Indian tradition from the second century onward has unanimously regarded as the first work of kavya, seems to confirm this fact of novelty. For in contrast to the manuscript record of the second great epic, the Mahabharata, which shows that it was transmitted entirely in writing (with the exception of a few of its books), that of the Ramayana testifies to a transitional relationship to writing. The manuscripts are independent transcriptions of an oral version of Valmiki's text that was passed down with considerable stability in largely memorized form. The firstness of the poem may therefore lie, in part at least, in its being the first major literary text committed to writing. On this interpretation, the upodghata, or prelude, to the Ramayana, which was a later addition to Valmiki's work, takes on an unanticipated significance: when the poet is shown to compose his poem after meditating and to transmit it orally to two young singers, who learn and perform it exactly as he taught it to them, what we are being given is, not an authentic image of a purely oral culture, but a sentimental 'fiction of written culture', as the phenomenon has been described for the remarkably parallel case of the chansons de geste. For here orality as such is being observed from outside orality, so to say, in a way impossible to do in a world ignorant of alternatives - ignorant, that is, of writing. Nostalgia for the oral and a desire to continue to share in its authenticity and authority, with the same lingering effects of a remembered oral poetry, mark other first moments of literacy across Eurasia, most memorably, in the English tradition, with Caedmon, whom one scholar recently described as an 'exemplum of grammatical culture'.8

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Literary culture and manuscript culture in precolonial India From the beginning of the Common Era kavya was always committed to writing and always circulated in manuscript form. Again, this is not to deny a continuing role for the oral performance of these written texts, or for the memorizing of such texts, let alone to deny a continuing vitality of primary oral poetry, which remains strong to this day in many communities in south Asia. 9 But from the moment writing was invented the literary culture that resulted, the Culture of kavya, became indissolubly connected with manuscript culture, so mUch so that the history of the one becomes unintelligible without taking into account the history of the other. II. COSMOPOLITAN MONOPOLIZATION OF LITERARY LITERACY, AND VERNACULAR DEFIANCE

One thing that has remained unintelligible in the history of literary cultures precisely because of insufficient attention to writing is the phenomenon of vernacularization. All of literary culture in southern Asia prior to the vernacular revolution of the early second millennium was composed in a language that was written and read across this entire space, namely Sanskrit (though restricted Use was also made of Prakrit and Apabhramsha, Middle-Indic literary dialects ,used largely as 'rustic' registers of what was actually court poetry). I call this cosmopolitan' language in large part because it was language that could 'travel well'; indeed, it became cosmopolitan precisely because it could travel well, as later Persian or English, for their different reasons, were able to travel (Sanskrit Was linked to no particular religious formation, and certainly not to colonial expansion). Sanskrit's monopolization of literary literacy was challenged around the beginning of the second millennium. It was literary inscription, the act of writing kavya, in regional languages - languages that did not travel well, that Were 'languages of, or in, Place' - that constituted the essential component of the challenge, and that alone allows us to grasp it in its historicity. This development was characterized in most places in India by a time lag between what I have called literization, the committing of local language to ~ocumentary, non-literary, written form, and literarization,'O the development of lIterary expressivity in accordance with the norms of a dominant literary culture. The interval between these two moments is often substantial and dramatic. Three to four centuries, as in the case of Kannada and Marathi, is not uncom~on (for the first, literization in the early sixth century, literarization in the late mnth; for the second, late tenth century and late thirteenth respectively); more extreme cases include Khmer and Newari (for the former, literization in the seventh century, for the latter, in the ninth; literarization for both only in the seventeenth). Bow do we explain this interval between the moments of writing as such and of writing literature? One answer may lie in the dialectical relationship between the literary function and the political function in India. Culture recapitulated POwer, and power underwrote culture, and so long as power meant trans-regional 81

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rule, or empire, as it meant until the end of the first millennium eE, literature required a trans-regional mode of expression. The regionalization of political power enabled - or even required, in ways we still do not fully understand the regionalization of culture. Prior to that point d_umentary writing in the vernacular, the recording of deeds and benefactions and so on, was entirely acceptable (contrast the very slow and reluctant acceptance of the vernaculars as languages of record in late medieval Europe). At the same time, the moment of literarization constituted something of a defiance against the established cultural order. It is important to realize that this defiance was typically not a matter of social status or religious resistance, despite received views about a demotic vernacularity or anti-Brahman insurgency. II In most parts ofIndia vernacularization was a project promoted by the royal court, and often by Brahmans themselves. Yet the authorization to write vernacularly, in the face of deep and long-term cultural-political prejudices to the contrary, was not ready to hand for anyone, even the royal court. The decision to make the vernacular speak literarily was often so fraught that it required the direct interventA'm of a power beyond that of the dominant cultural order, often the power of a divine being. Only in this way could the king of Vijayanagara himself, Krishrta Deh Raya, be authorized to write his remarkable Amukta-malyada in Telugu in 1517. A god comes to the author in a dream - a god significantly localized as 'The Great God Visnu of Andhra' (Andhra Pradesh being the region of Telugu) - and announces, You astounded us with honeyed poems in the language of the gods [i.e., Sanskrit] ", Is Telugu beyond you? Make a book in Telugu now, for my delight. Why Telugu? You might ask. This is the Telugu land. I am the lord of Telugu. There is nothing sweeter ... Don't you know? Among all the languages of the land, Telugu is best."

If the king was to compose a poem in Telugu, and not just compose but write it down in a book - and a fortiori a poem that attempts to offer, as the Amuktamalyada does, a total vision of political governance - he needed less the inspiration of the god than his permission, and of a sort he would never have needed for the creation of political literature in Sanskrit itself, the language of the gods. Similar stories of divine visitations (and of threatened destruction of the manuscript-books that resulted) are told of pocts from all social and religious orders, from Vedic Brahmans like Srinathudu (Telugu, fl. 1450), or devotional ones like Eknath (Marathi, fl. 1575) or Krsnadasa Kaviraj (Bangia, fl. 1600), to Shudras like Tukaram (Marathi, fl. 1625). To write vernacular literature, even as late as the seventeenth century, was for traditional communities almost to turn the cultural world upside down. '3

Literary culture and manuscript culture in precolonial India Very different is the history of the second, or regional-vernacular revolution, that followed upon, and often seems to have directly rejected the aims and p.ractices of, the first, or cosmopolitan-vernacular revolution, as I have called it, S10ce the project was to reproduce the Sanskrit cosmopolitan literary culture at the vernacular level. The later revolution, in many cases, rejected not only the cosmopolitan vernacular in substance (its laukika, or worldly, orientation), but also in its forms, especially its literacy: thus the 'Militant Saivas,' with their vacanas (sayings) in late-twelfth-century Karnataka, Narasimha Maheta with his prabhatiyas (spiritual aubades) in fifteenth-century Gujarat, or Kabir with his pads (songs) about the same time in Avadh, rejected the values, and the very fact, of manuscript culture. In the case of Kabir, the first manuscripts of works attributed to him do not appear until ISO years after his death; in the case of the vacana makers, the interval was twice as long. 14 . Many readers will find parallels here with Latin and medieval European !Iterary cultures. These include the invention (or at least far wider use) of writing 10 the fourth and third centuries BCE in Rome, and the invention of literature arOund 240 BCE with the adaptations by Livius Andronicus of Homer and the Attic tragedians; the subsequent cosmopolitan career of Latin, and the uniformity and wide diffusion of Latin literary culture; the vernacular transform~tions in the north of Europe in the ninth century (first at Alfred's Wessex) and 10 the south in the twelfth-fourteenth (Sicily, Occitan), which uncannily parallel Indian developments in the south in the ninth century (Karnataka) and in the north in the twelfth-fourteenth (Gujarat, Orissa, Assam, Bengal); the place of Islamicate literary cultures in the vernacularization processes in northern India and southern Europe, Islam's eastern and western frontiers up to the fifteenth century; and the second, or spiritual, vernacular revolution in India that bears comparison with the Reformation. Whatever causal factors may lie behind this larger Eurasian literary-cultural history, the local differences in developments are as significant as the parallels. 15 Such differences mark their respective manuscript cultures, too. III. MATERIALITIES OF MANUSCRIPT CULTURE IN INDIA

The propagation of the courtly-vernacular revolution required a set of corre!ative transformations in the more concrete aspects of literary culture. Centrally Important were the development of vernacular orthographies and of the grammatical, lexicographical and other philological appurtenances upon which Such orthographies rested. Orthographical reform turned out to be far less problematic than in Europe, not only technologically, since brahmi could easily be adapted to vernacular phonologies, but also ideologically. We find in India nothing similar to the situation in thirteenth-century Castile, where the archbishop was in charge of the chancery ex officio, and the reform of spelling in the service of vernacularization bordered on sin. 16 The development of a vigorous vernacular philology is to be found across southern India from the beginning of

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ARABIAN SEA

KANNADA \

-rA

TAMIL

MALAYALAM } TAMIL SINHALA

Fi gure

I.

Lan gua ge map.

BAY OF BENGAL

Literary culture and manuscript culture in precolonial India the vernacular age, but the situation in the north is far more obscure to us. For Brajbhasha (the literary language of what is now often called the 'Hindi belt'), scribes and commentators seem to have been perfectly aware of regional grammatical norms, but aside from the production of a few lexicons this knowledge was almost never systematized, not even by poets and scholars who were steeped from their childhood in the systematicity of the Sanskrit tradition, and in some cases dramatically espoused systematicity when it came to other disciplines, such as vernacular rhetoric. 17 It is puzzling that not a single north Indian precolonial grammar was produced, in a culture where language analysis had attained an uncommon degree of sophistication and where examples of such grammars ~bounded in the south. Similarly in Europe, it was in England under King Alfred 10 the early ninth century that one of the earliest grammatical cultures was promoted, which formed the background for Aelfric's English Grammatica a century later (995). By contrast, Italian grammars would not appear until the beginning of the sixteenth century (starting with Fortunio's Regole in 1516). SUbstantial evidence exists nonetheless to suggest that, whether textualized or not, such forms of philological knowledge in India served to 'assemble' and standardize the vernaculars in a way that upends most theories of vernacular standardization that depend on printing. 18 Of a piece with the individuation of vernacular languages through philological attention is the development of regional scripts. As noted earlier, all south Asian ~nd south-eastern Asian scripts derive ultimately from brahmi in one or other of Its forms. The great move toward a more regularized and definitive regionalization of scripts coincided with the revolution in vernacular literary culture. 19 There are two tendencies in these developments that seem to me important for a larger cultural theory and that are intriguingly the inverse of developments in Europe. First, the cosmopolitan languages (above all Sanskrit, but also Prakrit and Apabhramsha) could be and were (and often continue to be) written in any of the regional scripts. We thus find Sanskrit epigraphs inscribed in what we can by the eleventh or twelfth century justifiably name the bangia, javanese, kannada, khmer, oriya and telugu scripts. ao Second, script and vernacular language took on an increasingly one-to-one fit, and, correlatively, scripts were ever more carefully differentiated among each other: kannada from telugu, malayalam from tamil, bangla from hindi or rather devanagari. This was a tendency only consummated and not commenced in modernity." The contrast with Europe is stark: Latin followed the rule of the non-arbitariness and non-substitutability of the sign, as Anderson has called it, of all cosmopolitan languages other than Sanskrit such as Arabic, Chinese or Greek. To be sure, modifications in the Latin script itself did occur, including the important simplification from Merovingian cursive to Caroline miniscule, but mutually unintelligible written forms of Latin never developed; late-medieval scribes were perfectly able to read earlier manuscripts. aa By contrast, among western European vernaculars the tendency, intensifying in modernity, has been toward increasing commonality by the uniform use of the Latin alphabet. 85

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Two qualifications to this picture of Sanskrit ecumenicism and vernacular difference need to be made. First, the one-to-one relationship between vernacular language and script was relatively slow in consolidating. In multilingual Vijayanagara, the last imperial formation in pre-Mughal India (c. 1340-1565), the relationship was still fluid to some degree. Thus we find Sanskrit documents issued by the court in kannada, nandinagari (a form of southern devanagari), telugu and devanagari; Kannada in kannada, telugu, devanagari; Telugu in kannada, telugu and devanagari, and so on:3 In north India the language-script relationship was even more variable. Manuscripts of the Hindi (and very Hindu) Ram-carit-manas (discussed below), were written not only in devanagari but also in kaithi (a cursive 'clerk's' script widespread in north India), and perso-arabic; whereas Sufi works like Candayan (1379, whose author, Maulana Daud, wrote the original, as he tell us, in 'Turki' letters) circulated not only in perso-arabic but also in devanagari. By contrast, accounts of the history of the Bangia Caitanya-caritamrta (also discussed below) seem to suggest that copies had to be in bangla characters, which could not easily be prepared in Vrindavan to the west, where the work itself was composed and where its custodians, the Gosvamins (spiritual masters of the Vaisnava tradition), had settled.24 The second qualification is already inferable from the above: there was a distinct tendency, found from a relatively early period and sometimes it seems reinforced by phono-graphic considerations, to write Sanskrit in a script other than that employed for the local language. Grantha was thus used consistently for Sanskrit in Tamil country (instead of vattelutu and later tamil, both scripts lacking signs for the aspirated stops of Sanskrit) and in nandinagari in the Deccan. This tendency contributed toward the trans-regional spread of devanagari in Karnataka already in the ninth century. Again we can observe that what has become something of a literary-cultural norm in modern nationalist India the concomitance of Sanskrit and nagari - was a strong tendency already in the medieval period. We may also perceive further evidence of the persistence of traditional technologies in the face of the innovations that eventually became central to modern literary cultures. The indifference to writing prior to the mid-third century BeE, as evinced by the grammarian Panini, has already been suggested. Of a piece with this is the general unconcern with paper. Although this was introduced into the subcontinent sometime in the thirteenth century, it had no consequences in India remotely comparable to the European and Islamicate experience, where by providing a cheap alternative to parchment it opened up communication practices. Scribes in many places in India continued to prefer traditional writing materials, especially palmyra leaf in the south and birch bark in the north, well into the modern era. (It was the Mughal state, by contrast, in its desire to imitate the glories of Baghdad and Cairo, that came to be known as Kaghazi Raj, or Paper Kingdom.)'! More speculative is the case of block-print technology. It is likely this was made known to north Indians after Tibetans learned of it from China in the ninth 86

Literary culture and manuscript culture in precolonial India ~entury,

though actual proof of the existence of xylographic printing for Tibetan not available until the fifteenth century, when the Tibetan Buddhist canon was printed under the Ming dynasty. 'Indian Buddhist pandits in Tangut realms during the eleventh century (e.g. Jayananda) and later Indian visitors to the Mongol empire would likely have been among the first Indians to be aware of printing, though perhaps even someone like Devaputra, who was active in the Dunhuang area in western China in the mid-tenth century, would have known of printed Buddhist dharanis (mystical formulae). The numerous Varanasi pandits who visited the Fifth Dalai Lama's court from 1642 onwards included some who helped to correct texts published in Lhasa (e.g. the bilingual Avadanakalpalata) so we can be sure that some of them were entirely aware of xylography.,,6 As for movable-type printing, a few books were produced by the Portuguese in Goa in the 1550s, but significantly the experiment was shortlived and did not spread. As for the Mughals, it is doubtful they knew about printing at first hand, but they must have been exposed to printed books brought by European travellers, though they too had no interest in making their own. One may suppose the Mughals' indifference was related to their calligraphic tradition, which was unsuited to mechanical reproduction, but this would not explain the indifference of Hindus, for whom calligraphy was never a central cultural value. At all events, it seems clear that printing was another of the technologies that people in south Asia rejected as inferior or irrelevant to the material realities of their literary cultures. As Fernand Braudel once perceptively noted, 'civilizations' are defined as much by What they refuse from others as by what they borrow.'7 IS

IV. SCRIPT-MERCANTILISM

As I suggested at the start, the effects of print often seem to be exaggerated in scholarship, as least from the perspective of a student of south Asia. Here the true watershed in the history of communicative media was the invention, not of print-capitalism, but of script-mercantilism, so to call it, of the sort found in both Sanskrit and vernacular cultures. (The commercial side of this development became increasingly dominant in the course of the late medieval period, though I use the phrase here more broadly to include pre-print publishing sPonsored by the court or religious institutions.) This manuscript culture was enormously productive and efficient. The more than thirty million manuscripts estimated still to be extant (eight million in Rajasthan alone), along with many hundreds of thousands of inscriptions, represent the merest fraction of what must once have been produced. (Consider that for all of Greek literature, classical, Hellenistic, and Byzantine, some thirty thousand manuscripts are extant - a figure that the Indic materials thus exceed by a factor of 1000.),8 This Was a cultural economy constituted by professional scribes and patrons who purchased their wares as well as by non-professionals who copied for personal use or for family members or teachers. As in the case of the vernacular revolutions and the script transformations that

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accompanied them, we have no good accounts of the pre-print publishing industry of south Asia, least of all of such core features of manuscript culture as the conditions of manuscript diffusion. For very few texts do we have any sense of the pace or networks of manuscript distribution, or how language and genre affected these. As a kind of prolegomenon to a fuller account, four brief case studies are offered here, of four different socio-cultural publishing contexts: one courtly-literate, one religious-literate, one religious showing mixed oral-literate transmission, and one that might be called the market context of the earlymodern intellectual economy. Although several of the works in question are not in fact kavya, they serve to illustrate the kinds of circuits through which kavya also was distributed. (I) The story of the production and dissemination of the Sanskrit-PrakritApabhramsha grammar of the Jaina cleric and scholar Hemacandra, the Siddha-Hemacandra-Sabdanusasanam (c. 1140), is told in a fourteenth-century collection. The place of state patronage, the conditions of mass production and the remarkable expanse of the Sanskrit cosmopolitan order within which it circulated are explicitly addressed: Now, the venerable Hemacandra, having examined the collection of grammars [obtained by his king, Jayasimha Siddharaja of the Caulukya dynasty of Gujarat, who had been eager to create a new grammar for his kingdom], made a new, glorious, miraculous text known as the Siddha-haima [the Grammar of Hemacandra and Siddharaja] .... It consisted of sutras and an excellent commentary thereon, a dictionary of nouns, and a synonym lexicon. It was the very crest-jewel of grammatical texts and [came to be] held in esteem by scholars everywhere.... The king spent 300,000 coins to have the book copied in the course of a year. At the king's command, officials from every department zealously summoned three hundred scribes and showed hospitality to them. The books were copied, and one set was given to the most energetic scholar of each and every school of thought. The text circulated and grew famous in all lands [regions from Nepal to Sri Lanka, and from Persia to Assam are listed]. Twenty copies along with explanations were sent by the king with great gratitude to the Kashmiris [from whom he had borrowed the Sanskrit grammars on which he modeled his own], and the text was deposited in their library.

(2) Books were produced and disseminated not only by political orders but also by spiritual lineages. In the Jaina tradition, lay communities regularly commissioned the copying of canonical and paracanonical texts and presented them to mendicant orders 'for reading and [public] exegesis'.29 The most remarkable example of religiously motivated, and tightly controlled, text-reproduction in pre-modern India is offered by the BangIa-language Caitanya-caritamrta (Immortal Deeds of Caitanya) of Krsnadasa Kaviraj, a poetic biography of the religious reformer Caitanya (died c. 1533), composed around 1600, not in Bengal, but far to the west in Vrindavan, an important sacred centre ofVaishnavism. This is one of the most often reproduced texts in the history of Indian manuscript culture, now existing in more than two thousand copies - virtually identical copies. There is none of Eisenstein's 'textual drift' here; print was not the sole

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Literary culture and manuscript culture in precolonial India bulwark against variation. The publication history of this text has recently been reconstructed: A single copy of the work was hand carried back to Bengal by a trio of 'missionaries' sent to reorganize the Bengali community. The leader of that group, Srinivasacarya, was a ~rofessional scribe and 'publisher', already prominent in Vaisnava circles for that expertise. (The Gosvamis, spiritual masters of the sect, complain of the impossibility of getting good copies of texts made anywhere in the Braj vicinity far to the west of Bengal, so they send back to Bengal for copies; it is not clear if this was because of script issues or somet~ing else.) Their cart of books containing the Ca;tanya-car;tamrta was stolen near Vlsnupur, only to reappear in the treasury of local raja Vira Hamvira, who was eventually converted and 'initiated [into the Vaisvana faith] with the book'. Srinivasa instructed Vira Hamvira to finance copies so that the book could never be lost again. The first copies were dispatched back to Braj and to the trio. Sometime between 1600 and 1620, a series of festivals was organized to celebrate the death anniversaries of the last devotees to have ~nown Caitanya. At every festival, copies of the book were distributed to each lineage as Its representatives left for home. Copies of the Caitanya-caritamrta, among other texts, were ceremonially distributed to each lineage. Copies of the text of the Caitanyacaritamrta and other key Vaisnava texts (some twenty-five are listed in the sources) were repeatedly copied for consumption all over Bengal, northern Orissa, and Braj. Because of the tight control of Srinivasa in the reproduction of the Caitanya-caritamrta (and other texts), there is decidedly little variation in the manuscripts - a critical edition of the C~itanya-carjtamrta would in fact make no sense, because copies are virtually identical, With variation consisting of nothing more than the occasional spelling error, the insertion of paratextual material in the form of chapter/verse citations, or the appending of commentary.l. (3) Undoubtedly the most popular poem composed in Hindi (more strictly, Avadhi) in the precolonial period is Tulsidas's Ram-carit-manas (Holy Lake of ~he Deeds of the God Ram), c. 1575. This was a work produced by a literate poet In written form, but it was the lips of wandering performers rather than palm leaves that ensured its vast dissemination and enormous popular impact (even ~i~hin the poet's lifetime his fame had spread a thousand miles to the west). This IS In keeping with the spirit of the work, which refers to itself as a story-to-beperformed, a 'telling' (kafha), rather than a book (granth), and from an early period accounts are available of the lives and lineages of those who won fame as o~al performers or expounders. All that being readily admitted, the manuscript ~Istory of the work is also immeasurably vast, remarkably stable and entirely ~lterate (the modest variations, aside from scribal error and occasional sectarian Interpolation, have persuasively been attributed to different authorial versions). There is no evidence whatever of oral transmission of the sort made familiar in the combined work of Parry and Lord,l' Equally important, it was often the manuscript book of the poem that formed the basis of the kind of exegesis typical of performances: the first written commentary (late eighteenth century) was produced by an expounder who claimed to have in his possession the poet's autograph manuscript: 'Early expounders and commentators, not yet influenced by Western textual criticism, put great emphasis on obtaining the earliest and most

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authentic manuscripts.'3 2 Perhaps no better example exists of the peculiar relationship between oral and written in the 'publication' history of a lateprecolonial Indian text. (4) Around 1625 a scholar from the southern region of Andhra but residing in Varanasi wrote an introductory textbook on logic and ontology called the Tarka-samgraha, or 'Compendium of Reasoning'. Such textbooks in the different scholarly disciplines were a new genre in Sanskrit intellectual history, designed to meet the needs of what was apparently a new pedagogical market. The precise nature of this market remains obscure to us, but its demand for manuscript books was clearly intense, and this was met by a production owing neither to royal nor to religious patronage, but to the efforts of autonomous scribes. These were often the individual readers themselves, who copied (as colophons so often tell us) 'for my own reading', 'for teaching children', 'for my son', 'for helping others', 'for my own pleasure'. 33 But books were also purchased from professional scribes (often belonging to a caste specializing in clerkly culture, the kayasthas), often at very substantial cost. 34 For the Tarka-samgraha, we cannot trace the publication history in the first two generations (the earliest extant manuscripts of the work and its auto-commentary date to the second decade of the eighteenth century), but the work had moved swiftly across all of India by about the mid-eighteenth century. More than four hundred manuscripts are extant (and these are only the manuscripts that have been catalogued) in at least five scripts, with more than twenty-five commentaries. 35 And we should remember that in a traditional Indian educational environment, one manuscript went a long way: only one copy of the work would typically be required, being read aloud to the class by a student while being continuously commented on by the teacher. This was a literary culture, one would have to conclude, for which an entirely adequate and appropriate technology had been developed and maintained for centuries. V. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

Literary culture and manuscript culture in pre-modern south Asia were largely co-extensive. Much was produced in writing that was not literature, but literature, as locally defined, was always inscribed and what was not was not literature (but song or hymn or something else again). The old ways of orality, both as a phenomenon preserved from the Vedic world and as a feature of popular culture, continued to playa major role in how the literary text was actually experienced. But it is only an appreciation of the central place of writing in the constitution of regional literary cultures - something of which vernacular poets and intellectuals were fully conscious - that allows us to chart the revolution of the 'vernacular millennium' and the supplanting of the old cosmopolitan regime of culture and power that this revolution often represented. Understanding pre-modern literary culture means also understanding the

Literary culture and manuscript culture in precolonial India pragmatics of manuscript culture both internally and externally. Internally, we find an ever-intensifying process of cultural differentiation. A kind of synecdoche for this phenomenon (which comprised also a regularization of orthographies, lexicology and other elements of standardization) is the regionalization of scripts, which sought an ever-tighter one-to-one correspondence with regional languages through the late-medieval period. Externally, the life of the manuscript book can be mapped according to a time-space matrix of dissemination where language and genre were shaping factors, and where a wide spectrum of modalities in patronage and in the sphere and form of circulation is visible: from royal support to religious sponsorship to market forces; from limited geocultural domains to the vaster world of south and south-east Asia; from oral performance of a memorized text to texts meant for the peculiar oralliterate pedagogy of India, and even for private consumption. Whatever other conclusions we may wish to draw from these data, they suggest how uncertain it remains that the print-capitalism of modernity - with the obliteration of oral text performance, the privatization of reading and the hyper-commodification of the book - has had in India anything like the historic impact, in depth and extent, of pre-modern script-mercantilism. 36 NOTES I

2

3 4

5 6

7

See Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, ed. by Sheldon Pollock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Roger Chartier, The Order of Books (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 3. See also Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983) and Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Information on the project 'Indian Knowledge Systems on the Eve of Colonialism' is available at www.columbia.edn/sanskrit Some of the materials and formulations contained in this essay are adapted from my Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). See also my 'Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History', in Cosmopolitanism, ed. by Carol Breckenridge and others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 591-626, and my 'India in the Vernacular Millennium: Literary Culture and Polity, 1000-1500', in Early Modernities, ed. by S. N. Eisenstadt et al. (Daedalus, 127,3 (1998)), 41-74. All Indic diacritics have been omitted here. Script names are given in lower-case, language names in upper-case, throughout. Fundamental is Harry Falk, Schrifi im alten Indien: Ein Forschungsbericht mit Anmerkungen (Ttibingen: Gunter Narr, 1993). On Asoka's inscriptions see my 'Axialism and Empire', in Axial Civilizations and World History, ed. by Johann Arnason and others (Leiden: Brill, 2005). On the oral transmission of the Veda see Kumarila Bhatta, Tantravarttika (Pune: Anandasrama, 1970), vol. I, p. 123 (his stricture was a response to the fact that Vedic texts had in fact come to be written down, as early as the fifth century CE). The story

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8

9

10

I I

12

13

14

15

16 17

of Dhanapala appears in Puratanaprabandhasamgraha, ed. by Jinavijaya (Calcutta: Abhisthata-Singhi Jaina Jnanapitha, 1936), p. 41, no. 60. The publishing of a literary work was typically its first oral performance, see my 'Sanskrit Literary Culture from the Inside Out', in Literary Cultures in History (note I above), pp. 39-130 (specifically pp. 89-90). For an account of the arankerram, or oral-performative literary debut, in the Tamil tradition, which was fully alive at late as the 1860s, see Norman Cutler, 'Three Moments in the Genealogy of Tamil Literary Culture', in Literary Cultures in History, pp. 271-322 (specifically pp. 282-5). On Valmiki see 'Sanskrit Literary Culture', pp. 80-4; on the chansons de geste, HansUlrich Gumbrecht, 'Schriftlichkeit in miindlicher Kultur', in Schrift und Gedachtnis: Beitrage zur Archaologie der literarischen Kommunikation, ed. by Aleida Assmann and others (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1983), pp. 158-74 (p. 168); on Caedmon, Martin Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture: 'Grammatica' and Literary Theory, 350-1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 431-5. And often with modalities specific to south Asia. On Rajasthani epic (and the oral recitation of a stably memorized text), John D. Smith, The Epic of Pabuji: A Study, Transcription, and Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); on Tulu epic (and the Heisenberg principle at the level of textual transcription, where the observer affects the thing observed), Lauri Honko, Textualising the Siri Epic (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia/Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1998). For a general account, Oral Epics in India, ed. by Stuart Blackburn and others (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). I felt forced to coin (as I thought) this rebarbative term (in 'The Cosmopolitan Vernacular', Journal ofAsian Studies, 57,1 (1998),6-37), but others also appear to have found it unavoidable, e.g. Pascale Casanova, Republique des lettres (Paris: Seuil, 1999), pp.188-93· For references see 'The Cosmopolitan Vernacular', pp. 28-32. Trans. V. Narayana Rao, 'Coconut and Honey: Sanskrit and Telugu in Medieval Andhra', in Literary History, Region, and Nation in South Asia, ed. by Sheldon Pollock (Social Scientist, 23,10-12 (1995», 24-40 (specifically p. 24); see also V. Narayana Rao and others, 'A New Imperial Idiom in the Sixteenth Century: Krishnadevaraya and his Political Theory of Vijayanagara', in South Indian Horizons, ed. by Jean-Luc Chevillard and Eva Wilden (Pondicherry: Institut fran'rais, 2004), pp. 597-625. On Srinathudu and Krsnadasa Kaviraj see Literary Cultures in History (note I above), pp. 419-26 and 518-21 respectively; for Eknath and Tukaram, Shankar Gopal Tulpule, Classical Marathi Literature: From the Beginning to A.D. 1818 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1979), pp. 354-58 and 286-4)1 respectively. The Millennium Kabjrvani: A Collection of pad-s, ed. by Winand M. Callewaert and others (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers & Distributors, 2000), pp. 1-26; Prithvidatta Chandrashobhi, Premodern Communities and Modern Histories: Narrating Virasaiva and Lingayat Selves (University of Chicago dissertation, 2005). These are spelled out in The Language of the Gods (note 4 above), chapters 7 and 12, and some are touched on briefly below. See also my 'The Transformation of Culture-Power in Indo-Europe, 1000-1300', in Eurasian Transformations, ed. by Bjorn Wittrock and others (Medieval Encounters, 2004). Roger Wright, 'Latin and Romance in the Castilian Chancery (1180-1230)', Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (Liverpool), 73 (1996), 115-28. Allison Busch, 'The Anxiety of Innovation: The Practice of Literary Science in the

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Literary culture and manuscript culture in precolonial India

18

19

20 21

22 23 24 25

26 27

28

29

30

Hindi Riti Tradition', in Forms of Knowledge in Early-modern South Asia, ed. by Sheldon Pollock (= Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Vol. 24, 2 (forthcoming». See for example John Earl Joseph, Eloquence and Power: The Rise of Language Standards and Standard Languages (New York: Blackwell, 1987), and of course Anderson, Imagined Communities (note 2 above), pp. 4H). A certain standardization has certainly been achieved by Kannada, Gujarati and other vernaculars by the fourteenth century. Very little good work exists on the development of post-brahmi scripts, certainly none that moves beyond positivist paleography. The best in the latter category remains A. H. Dani, Indian Palaeography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963). He points toward 'proto-regional' developments centuries before vernacularization (p. 108) but offers no good hypothesis to account for it, aside from variation according to new writing tools, and the rather vague categories of 'taste for ornamentation', and the 'tendency to simplification' (p. 113). One ambitious recent overview, in The World's Writing Systems, ed. by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 371-430, ignores every question of cultural-theoretical interest. Note that with very few exceptions (e.g. brahmi itself, and siddhamatrka) there are almost no pre-modern descriptors for Indic scripts. In 983 CE, the patron of the colossus at Sravanabelgola in Karnataka signed his name on the statue's foot in three languages and four scripts: Kannada in kannada characters, Tamil in grantha and vattelutu, and Marathi in devanagari (Epigraphia Carnatika 2: 159-60, nos 272, 273, 276). See David Ganz (pages 147-56). On the non-arbitrary sign see Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 20-1. The information is derived from B. Gopal, Vijayanagara Inscriptions (Mysore: Directorate of Archaeology and Museums, Government of Karnataka, 1985- ). Tony Stewart, personal communication (see n. 30 below). Bimal Kumar Datta, Libraries and Librarianship ofAncient and Medieval India (Delhi: Atma Ram and Sons, 1970), p. 131. See in general P. K. Gode, 'Migration of Paper from China to India- AD 105-1500', in Studies in Indian Cultural History, vol. 3 (Pune: BOR Institute, 1969), pp. 1-12, especially pp. 4-5. Matthew Kapstein, personal communication. Fernand Braudel, On History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 203-5. The remarkably slow acceptance of printing in Japan (see Peter Kornicki, this volume) is a striking parallel. And possibly, by a factor of three, 'all that the scribes of Europe had produced since Constantine founded his city in AD 330' (see Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 13). The estimate on Indic manuscripts comes from the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts. The Greek comparison lowe to Christopher Minkowski. Jainapustakaprasastisamgraha, ed. by Jinavijayamuni (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidyabhavan, 1943), e.g. no. 166 (p. 120), 180 (p. 122). For a convenient recent account of Hcmacandra and his works see R. C. C. Fynes, tr. Hemacandra: The Lives of the Jain Elders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). I am very grateful to Tony Stewart for allowing me to cite this account from his work in progress. See also Edward C. Dimock and Tony Stewart, trans. Caitanyacaritamrta of Krsnadasa Kavjraj (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999).

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31 Albert Lord, Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1960). 32 Philip Lutgendorf, The Life of a Text: Performing the Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 141; see also pp. 9, 117, 13-31 and I I for other points made in the paragraph. Useful on the transmission of the text is Sambhunarayan Chaubhe, Manas Anusilan (Varanasi: Nagari Pracarini Sabha, 2024 1967), especially pp. 40-5. Imre Bangha's work on Tulsi's Kavitavali shows that the extant manuscripts 'stem from written versions, and no phase of oral transmission was involved'. See 'The Dynamics of Textual Transmission in Pre-modern India', in Forms of Knowledge in Early-modern South Asia (note 17 above).

=

33 atmapathanartham,· balapathanartham; paropakarartham (Descriptive catalogue of Sanskrit manuscn'pts in the Adyar Library, ed. by K. Madhava Krishna Sarma [Adyar, Madras: Adyar Library, 1942-], vol. 5, pp. 305, 100); putrasya pathanartham; atmamanoharartham (A descriptive catalogue of Sanskrit manuscripts, ed. by Hara Prasad Shastri [Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1917-], vol. 7, no. 4985; p. 286). 34 Some data for the 12th to 16th centuries are collected in Jainapustakaprasastisamgraha, e.g. nos 191 (p. 123), 333 (p. 142) (kayasthas); e.g. nos 84 (p. 78), 256 {p. 132),285 (p. 136) (mulyena grhita); no. 78 (p. 74) (dravyam hhuri vitirya pustakam

idam ... lekhitam). 35 It is unclear what the manuscript history of the Tarka-samgraha might tell us about the question of textual drift, since no one has examined the manuscripts of the work in detail. One study of a seventeenth-century work on language philosophy (what might be called a monograph rather than a textbook) shows just how vulnerable the text was to invasion by scholiasts' comments. See Gerdi Gerschheimer, La tMorie de la signification chez Gadadhara (Paris: Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, 1996), pp. 103-72, especially pp. 158-66. Some suggestions on the relationship between genre and textual stability and criticism are offered in Gerard Colas, 'Critique et transmission dans la litterature sanskrite', in Des Alexandries I: Du livre au texte, ed. by Luce Giard and Christian Jacob (Paris: Bibliotheque national de France, 2001), pp. 309-28 (pp. 319-23). 36 I am very grateful to Ian Willison and Graham Shaw for their criticisms of earlier drafts of this essay. I also wish to express my sincere gratitude to Wim Stockhof and the staff of the International Institute of Asia Studies, Leiden, which hosted me as visiting senior fellow during the drafting of this essay in June 2004.

94

THE SHAHNAMA AND THE PERSIAN ILLUSTRATED BOOK' ROBERT HILLENBRAND

with a substantial introduction that deals with the general issue of the illustrated epic and the effect on it of a tradition of oral performance. While illustrated epics in other cultures are not unknown - the Ambrosiana Iliad and Mughal Ramayana manuscripts are cases in point the huge corpus of illustrated Shah nama ('Book of Kings') manuscripts is a thoroughly atypical phenomenon in the context of world literature; the instability of the text of the Shahnama has further impacted on that tradition. After a brief discussion of these issues, attention will focus on three themes that bear on the role of the illustrated book in medieval Iran. The first is the Persian renaissance of the tenth century. This was a backlash against the forcible imposition of Arab language and culture, a backlash in some senses both spearheaded and symbolized by the Shahnama, a heroic epic of some fifty to sixty thousand couplets (the uncertainty is due to the difficulty of establishing an authentic text) by the eastern Iranian poet Firdausi, completed c. 1010 CEo The second theme deals with the reasons for the perennial popularity of the Shahnama both within Iran and throughout a much wider cultural sphere. The final theme concerns the way that artists responded to the challenge of depicting the stories of the national epic. Here the discussion will focus on the treatment of a figure who, though world-famous, is not generally familiar in his Persian guise, namely Alexander the Great, who has maintained his charisma intact to this day over improbable gulfs of space and time. Some introductory remarks will be in order. It is perhaps natural for an art historian to approach the world of books in Muslim culture through the medium of illustrations. But books with pictures were the exception, not the rule, in medieval Islamic society, where literacy was widespread and was further encouraged by numerous public libraries. Books were big business; let us recall that the legendary library of the tenth-century caliph al-Hakam II at Cordoba allegedly contained some four hundred thousand volumes' at a time when the great monastic libraries in the West had holdings better measured in the hundreds than the thousands. This truly startling contrast had much to do with the Islamic preference for producing books via dictation to large groups rather than via oneto-one copying. J Even illustrated books were apt to be created in this way.4 Moreover, the continuing commercial dynamism of the book trade throughout THIS CHAPTER WILL BEGIN

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most of the Islamic middle ages and in many of the major Muslim centres ensured that even illustrated books (among which, in Iran, the Shahnama was predominant) were at times produced in substantial numbers for a market of the educated and mercantile elite. S Such illustrated books were overwhelmingly secular in character. As with the epics of certain other cultures, fairly standardized copies of the Shah nama were produced in quantity, and this occurred from the fourteenth century onwards. But there was one key difference between the epic in Iran and the epic elsewhere. In addition to the adoption of certain formulae - for page layout, illuminated captions or chapter headings, and types of hand - such as operated in other, non-Islamic, traditions in which multiple copies of certain epics were made, mass production in the case of the Shahnama often had the added dimension of scores of pictures. Mass production is of course a relative concept here. Such a book was still a luxury object. And since most surviving illustrated Shahnamas were made for educated people to buy, the issue of whether the illustrations were intended merely as pictures - what one might term optional extras - or as something more ambitious, a parallel visual exegesis, in which the painter explores some of the implications of the text, and thus is apt to go off at a tangent from it, poses itself with some insistence. 6 But there were certain constraints to be obeyed here. While no two Shahnamas have exactly the same iconographic programme, certain scenes became standard fare for the illustrator,' and custom constrained their composition and format by ever narrower parameters. In this process one may again recognize the influence of the mass market, with its tendency towards uniformity, and a consequent saving of time and therefore money. There was, in short, a conveyor belt in operation, and artists did not scruple to repeat themselves, as becomes increasingly evident by the fifteenth century. This repetition makes itself felt partly in the way that illustrations are limited to a small group of especially popular episodes from the poem, and partly in the use of formulaic compositions which by minor tweaking can be made to fit a variety of episodes. 8 This process is quite distinct from the deliberate copying of earlier paintings as an act of homage or as a way of demonstrating skill. The market did not encourage painters to spend three months on an image when three days (or less) would do. This key role of commerce, rather than princely patronage, was the factor which ensured that the illustrated Shahnama flourished throughout the Persian-speaking world, from Turkey to India, Kashmir and central Asia. The implications of that fact have been slow to percolate into modern scholarship. Even manuscript copies of Firdausi's text, whether illustrated or not, by no means give us the whole picture, for no account of the impact of the Shahnama could afford to ignore the impact of the epic as an oral text. (The Qur'an, it will be remembered, also has both a literary and an oral tradition.) As was the case with the Homeric epics,9 there existed an elite reading public,'O but also a mass audience for the performed text of the epic," so that it became a remarkably familiar text at all levels of society. The rhapsode (naqqali) is still alive and well

The Shahnama and the Persian illustrated book in Iran;" and before the coming of radio and television, apart from the ta 'ziya or Passion play, which was religious and performed only in the sacred month of Muharram,13 the principal form of public entertainment throughout the country Was the coffee-house recitation of the Shahnama. This persistent tradition of public performance, when considered alongside the relatively late date of the earliest surviving written version of the text (the copy in Florence dated 1217)14 begs the question of how reliable the text is. Here an example from quite another culture may be helpful. One theory about the Homeric epics is that the texts survived for some two centuries (possibly longer) and with minimal changes, in oral form, recited by transmitters who were not significantly creative artists. But before the text crystallized, c. 150 BCE, in more or less the form we now know, it acquired - as the Homeric papyri datable up to the early third century BCE show - many so-called 'wild lines' which were themselves perhaps the result of continued performances, a kind of secondary orality. There are clearly arresting parallels here with the preservation of Firdausi's text and with the role of orality in that process. In the context of an illustrated epic they are particularly relevant, for they suggest the likelihood that a passage of spurious text, or a parallel text from another source, could very well generate illustrations. 15 It is time now to turn to the question of images. Let us dispose at the outset of the preconception that the Qur'an forbids the making of images. It does not. True, clerics have squabbled inconclusively over the issue for centuries,16 and there was indeed a widespread distaste for figural images in a religious context. But no similar aversion makes itself felt in the secular milieu at large. In fact, the illustrated book in the Islamic world has a history that can be traced back for a millennium on the evidence of surviving codices alone, and textual references take the story back another two hundred years. 17 This lengthy time-frame is liable to conceal the fact that the floruit of this art form was relatively short, extending as it did from c. 1200 to c. 1600. In that period, however, it established itself as one of the major genres of Islamic art, and - still more important - as the major conduit for painting within that culture. Frescoes were always of secondary importance. These circumstances give book painting a much greater role in the Islamic lands than it had in the West, which is the obvious benchmark because Europe like the Islamic world favoured the codex above other forms of book. Europe, by contrast, sank its energies into altarpieces and easel painting - forms effectively unknown to Muslims - and into frescoes, with illustrated books trailing (rightly or wrongly) far behind in the hierarchy of western art history. In Iran, while royalty and the aristocracy provided over the centuries the patronage required for luxury illustrated books, there was also (as in Europe; one has only to think of fourteenth-century Paris) a vibrant market at a much lower level, and it is this commercial market that accounts for the majority of the illustrated Persian books that have survived. The themes of those books even made their way to other media, notably ceramics. 18 The briefest glance at the history of book painting in the Islamic world makes

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ROBERT HILLENBRAND

it plain that it is Iran - not the Arab world, not Turkey, not India - that has the longest continuous tradition, as well as the richest, most varied and most inventive one, in this medium. The prime vehicle for that inventiveness was a single text which was illustrated far more than any other text in the entire canon of Islamic painting: Firdausi's Shahnama. The history of Persian painting, in other words, can be traced by means of the illustrations of this one text. 19 Nearly four hundred illustrated copies of this text, dating from c. 1300 to c. 1900, and produced in the lands between Egypt and India, between Turkey and central Asia, survive. No other text can marshall anything like this total.·O It is likely, moreover, that these represent a mere fraction of what was originally created. But these survivals are more than enough to create a critical mass that permits scholars to develop a variety of approaches to how this text was illustrated.·1 A five-year project (1999-2004), sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) and carried out at the universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh, has resulted in the creation of an illustrated database in which these manuscripts are catalogued and where information about the relation between text and image, the precise location of a given painting in a given manuscript, the changing interpretations of each episode over the years, and the nature of iconographic cycles, can easily be accessed. The Princeton database, containing 277 illustrations from 5 manuscripts, with some supplementary material, was a first attempt in this direction (www.princeton.edu/-shahnama/). Now for the first theme, the cultural and political context within which the Shahnama was created, a context of burgeoning national sentiment. This was itself a long-delayed reaction to the trauma of the Arab conquest of Iran between 637 and 651. Of course it would be an exaggeration to maintain that Firdausi's purpose in writing the Shah nama was to counter an ignominious Arab present with a glorious Persian past. But in fact it has seldom been the fate of a single book so to offset actual political defeat by a virtual victory in the mind, so there is more than a grain of truth in such a premise. Let us begin by considering the cultural setting. Firdausi gave classic shape to his countrymen's wistful memories of a world without Arabs and Arabic, and even without Islam. In so doing he reversed the humiliation endured nearly four centuries previously by a proud and ancient civilization at the hands of lizard-eating" desert nomads. Just before the fateful battle of Q!tdisiyya in 637, which opened Iran to the Arab invaders, the Sasanian Persian generalissimo Rustam met his Arab counterpart, al-Mughira. 'We have the kingship,' he boasted; but was silenced by the retort, 'But we have the religion.'·3 If it didn't happen that way, it should have, for that dichotomy (which resonates in Firdausi's own account of the diplomatic preliminaries to the battle) crystallizes the perennial conflict between these two cultures. That conflict took literary as well as military shape in the so-called Shu'ubiyya, the ninth-century 'battle of the books' in which Islamized Persians - writing, let us note, in Arabic - disputed intellectual supremacy in literature and philosophy with the Arabs;'· and that conflict can still be sensed in the Shahnama,

The Shahnama and the Persian illustrated book admittedly in a more implicit rather than explicit manner. The illustrations evoke the vanished glamour of Persian kingship just as they suggest nothing of Islam: in that sense they belong to the past rather than the present. For the Arabs brought their religion, and with it their language, to all the countries that they conquered. The Qur'an contained the very words of God and could therefore not be translated; and so its language, and often the calligraphy whereby it was transcribed, took on a numinous character. Thus Arabic readily became the lingua franca of the world of Islam, not only for the religious sciences such as Qur'anic commentary, the traditions of the Prophet and law, but also for philosophy, science and even literature. In the process it inevitably exerted a repressive effect on the high languages that it supplanted. 'S Middle Persian, the language in which manuals of statecraft and administration had been composed, was no exception. Thus the Persian sense of disfranchisement was acute. Their empire, which under the Achaemenids, Parthians and Sasanians had dominated much of central and western Asia for most of the previous millennium and more, had gone with the wind. So much for the cultural context. What of the political situation? The Arabs had settled en masse in large tracts of Iranian territory, displacing the local landed aristocracy. But their loyalties were naturally directed westwards, to the Arab caliph, first in Damascus and then in Baghdad. Those caliphs, however, found it increasingly difficult to control the centrifugal tendencies of an empire stretching from the Pyrenees to the Pamirs, from central France to the borders of China, and it was perhaps inevitable that such an empire should begin to fray at the edges. Spain broke away in the west in 756, and in 827 it was the turn of the Iranian east, when the caliph gave one of his most trusted governors hereditary control there. While the outward forms and symbols of loyalty to the caliph such as the mention of his name on the coinage and at the Friday service - were still strictly observed, de Jacto independence was only a matter of time. Indeed, occasional rebellions against the central power erupted in this area in the ninth century. The most serious was that of the Saffarids, whose leader, one Ya'qub the Coppersmith, is presented by one of his panegyric poets, Ibrahim ibn Mamshadh, as possessing the imperial Iranian banner, known as the banner of Kaveh. ,6 This is a calculated reference to one of the popular heroes of the Shahnama, the blacksmith Kaveh, who hoisted his leather apron as a standard to rouse the common people against the tyrant Zahhak. '7 That same poem, written in the 870S, vaunts Ya'qub, a man of lowly birth, as a descendant of the mythical Persian king Jamshid; it boasts that the inheritance of the noble kings of Persia has fallen to his lot, and that he is reviving their lost glory. Ironically enough, for all its anti-Arab sentiment, this poem is written in Arabic, even though the poet's patronymic (Mamshadh - 'the mother is joyful') proclaims his Persian descent:8 In the ninth and tenth centuries, under the patronage of Persian dynasties, new Persian developed as a literary language, cutting its teeth on translations from Arabic of Islamic universal histories Z9 and of the fables of Bidpai, a phenomenally popular book of animal tales whose text was rendered during the

99

ROBERT HILLENBRAND

Middle Ages into over thirty languages from Icelandic to Indonesian. 30 The tenth century was the age of the first great Persian poets, most of whom made their careers as panegyrists. 31 Contemporary ceramics vividly illustrate a society poised between two cultures. It is worth noting that the very material of glazed pottery - cheap earthenware when all is said and done - suggests patrons who were affluent townspeople rather than aristocrats. On the one hand we encounter Arabic proverbs executed in stylish Kufic calligraphy with a peerless sense of interval and an intellectual appreciation of the visual potential of empty space. Such work, known from literally thousands of sherds, implies widespread literacy, an important factor in the contemporary flowering of literature. Other dishes, by contrast, capture the stately majesty of a ceremonial Sasanian royal hunt. Admittedly these images are reduced, provincialized, and in some ways only a shadow of the glamour that had gone; but their evocative power was undimmed. It shines through their awkward vernacular idiom. 3' The celebrated Persian renaissance of the tenth century, which culminated in Firdausi's Shahnama, took many different forms, visual as well as textual. Kings wore Sasanian crowns, mounted Sasanian thrones, and took Sasanian titles such as shahanshah ('king of kings').J3 Such details suggest that they subscribed enthusiastically to the ancient Iranian notion of the royal radiance (farr-i kiyam) which was popularly held to surround the legitimate king. 34 They visited the magnificent ruins of Persepolis, the Achaemenid capital built largely in the sixth century BCE, and had its inscriptions deciphered for them (so they said) by Zoroastrian priests, before leaving their names on its walls. 35 They forged genealogies for themselves which linked them to the great kings of the preIslamic past, and many noble Persians kept the memories of those monarchs green by adopting their personal names. 36 They maintained such ancient customs as the celebration of the traditional spring and autumn festivals and the annual review of the army, and many Zoroastrian customs were still observed. 37 Well into the eleventh century buildings bore inscriptions in Middle Persian alongside those in Arabic, and used the Sasanian solar calendar alongside its Muslim lunar equivalent. 38 The Caspian provinces, where old traditions died hard, minted coinage of Sasanian type long after the rest of the Muslim world had abandoned it in favour of purely epigraphic currency, and continued to pay their taxes in silver plate as they had done under the Sasanians. 39 The Iranian world, in short, clung fiercely to its pre-Islamic past and, in the cultural as distinct from the religious sphere, refused to bow the knee to the pervasive Arabization which by the year 1000 had engulfed most of the Muslim lands. It was Firdausi who rescued 40 and codified the scattered national traditions, partly from oral informants but mainly from written sources which were rendered largely in prose,41 and gave them unified form in verse. 4• Firdausi's decision to end that history with the defeat of the last Sasanian monarch at the hands of the Arabs definitively separated in the national consciousness the period before Islam from what followed the coming of the new religion. 43 The barrier between the two periods was not nearly as impassable or impermeable as Firdausi makes 100

The Shahnama and the Persian illustrated book out, but he, if anyone, crystallized the sense of such a barrier, and it seems likely that he intended all along that his epic would create strong national sentiment. In this regard there is perhaps a parallel to be made here with the role of epic literature in the political process whereby regional kingdoms emerged, as Sheldon Pollock's chapter in this volume demonstrates, from the break-up of the Gupta empire. This, then, is the context within which the Shahnama was created, and that leads to the second theme of this paper, though it overlaps with the first: why was the Shahnama so popular? This is of course a chapter in itself, so let us stick to essentials. First and foremost, language. Here too Firdausi's was a work of rescue. 44 His mighty line, with its regular beat and its end-stopped rhymes, lends itself perfectly to declamation and, more specifically, to popular oral performace. His set pieces, such as battles and laments, are especially well suited to that mode. To this day a special tone, at once nasal and resonant, and instantly recognizable, is adopted by those who quote the Shahnama, and particularly by the professional coffee-house reciters. 45 The verses are made much easier to remember not only because they rhyme but also by the nature of the metre itself: U - - I U - - I U - - I U -, which follows the pattern of the English line: 'The Pharaohs of Egypt, the Caesars of Rome'.46 Or, to give a specimen of the original: 47 agar tond badj bar ayad ze konj be khak afkanad naraside foron} setamakare khanimesh ar dadgar honarmand danimesh ar bi honar agar marg dadasl bidad chist ze dad in hame bang 0 faryad chist

What if a fierce and vagrant wind springs up, And casts a green unripened fruit to earth. Shall we call this a tyrant's act, or just? Shall we consider it as right or wrong? If death is just, how can this not be so? Why then lament and wail at what is just?

Just as, in his role of historian, Firdausi broke with Islamic precedent in weeding out the Semitic elements in the early history of mankind, removing the Hebrew and Arabian prophets,48 so he took immense pains to expurgate from his vocabulary as many as possible of the Arabic elements which by this time had well-nigh infested the Persian language. Grossly exaggerated claims have been made as to the extent of this purification; in fact, the percentage of words of Arabic origin has been calculated at between 4 per cent and 5 per cent.49 But this is far lower than was the norm with other roughly contemporary poets or prose writers in Persian. To a considerable extent, therefore, his vocabulary was contrived and recondite. Hence the Shahnama has become a thesaurus for later generations. More than that, it instilled a pride in Persian as a language of literature and culture. Persian was the court and administrative language of Anatolia and especially northern India for centuries, and thus it is no cause for surprise that court poets of those areas, among many others, should promote, indeed exalt, local rulers through the medium of either actual Shahnamas, perhaps lightly doctored, or entire pastiches of them. The latter was common practice. In Turkey, Ahmad rl ~'r e '"1'1' .1.l.ln"'n ,.,~ '\'"'1'1.~ PLMHTlA.l'"' I .." /'. I r'-~' Ct"?'rru

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rjud,o q1l16; dllflllor The diversity of style of the illuminations and their varied provenance (not always Venetian) show that in general it was the owners, not the press, that commissioned this decoration. One small group of four copies does have a similar style of illumination, and has been attributed to Benedetto Bordon and his workshop. 33 Given the links between Bordon and the circles of Aldus, it has been suggested that these copies Were part of a co-ordinated production; however, it seems unlikely that this was arranged by the printer. 34 Another sign of esteem by contemporaries is the care with which copies of the Aldine Petrarch and Dante might be bound. 35 Knowing that the Petrarchs on vellum would reach an influential elite, Bembo used the para textual space in them for purposes of self-publicity, giving, in the colophon of these copies alone, the extra information that he was a noble Venetian and was not only the provider of the copy text but also its editor. 36 As a member of the aristocracy who had not yet ruled out the hope of being elected to political office, he did not want his name to go out to a wider public, through the paper copies, in a way that might suggest he were a common editor employed part-time; but he judged, at least in the first instance, that members of his

BRIAN RICHARDSON I..

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The diffusion of literature in Renaissance Italy own class would appreciate that he was doing this as an act of scholarship. 37 During the period when Bembo was involved in the editions of Petrarch and Dante, he was also occupied in composing the Asolani, his first major work in the vernacular. Because of its amorous content, publishing this work was a daring undertaking for someone expected to enter a career in Venetian politics. The work was also revolutionary in its language, since it was the first by a non-Tuscan to set out to imitate faithfully the prose style of Boccaccio, even to the extent of including words no longer in common usage. By providing a Boccaccesque model for prose writing, the Asolani complemented the new model for verse writing constituted by the edition of Petrarch, and the work was thus another key text in Bembo's new programme for the language and literature of the vernacular. When this bold, even provocative work was ready to be published, in the autumn of 1504, Bembo turned once more to Aldus Manutius, and once more used the resources of his press in order both to capture the interest and to win the support of the most sophisticated readers. The Aldine edition of March 1505 ~ould have caught their attention because it was the first modern literary work 10 the vernacular for which Aldus had used his italic type, and the first book in which he used this type combined with a quarto format (Figure 2}.38 It was related to the series of classics, yet had a distinct identity. Copies of this edition, too, could be given fine bindings. 39 The impact of the Asolani of 1505 was widespread and very rapid. It is testified both by printed imitations·o and, in another way, by the very strength of hostile reaction in some quarters to Bembo's use of language. This impact would have been inconceivable if Bembo had circulated the work, not simply in manuscript, but probably also in a different printed form and through a different press. What one might call the social use of print was thus crucial to Bembo in giving wider and more rapid diffusion to his literary ideals during the first decade of the sixteenth century. His attention to the physical properties of his editions was ~n integral part of his creative input as editor and author, and it was surely an lmportant factor in his success because, as he well knew, the cultural connotations embedded in these properties would modulate the responses of key readers. Through his collaboration with Aldus, the printed book thus gave much to Bembo. But Bembo also gave much in return to Aldus and, indirectly, to sixteenth-century Italian printing in general. Firstly, it is notable that the Dante and the Petrarch were the only two entirely verse works in the vernacular that Aldus produced. He would almost certainly not have undertaken these ventures without the Venetian's collaboration. Secondly, the two men together developed new techniques (new punctuation marks and a limited use of diacritic accents) in order to improve the correct pronunciation of the written word in Latin and Italian and to facilitate its understanding and silent reading. Thirdly, Bembo may well have had a role in Aldus's choice of octavo: the printer said that his choice of this format for literary works was derived from manuscript models in the library of Bembo's father, Bernardo. Moreover, the editions of Petrarch and

BRIA N RI CHARDSON

mofli }yifDrlldre; tt apml qUtg[iocchi, che in quef/"o ~ rmno fl chiuelono , m/.rttre am efJi quella ineffitbilc btlc l~ , ell (Ui [ono amante foa dolce mt'f'ce 'ifa buon trm 1'0 : tt hora ptrche io uuchio Jia , Q)mt tu m/. utdi i eU" non m'ha perao meno ),he malrra eht) atro : tie m/. ri= FUter4 ; perche io eli Q)Ji groffo panno uefhto Ie Had" ;"n.tnZ! . Q...!!:antunque tie io Q)n 'luef/"o panno u'an= 4ro j tie tu am'luello u'4ndrai:nt altro di'luefh luogh;. Ii por", atCllno flQ) dipartrndofl ) che gli fo0i amer;: EqHali fo fot10 fhth dl 'lHef1~ btU~ ) che 'lila 'ifu fo .. tao ; percio che elfo Q)l" fo non fogliono )rna rrmanf!ino flU" terra eli (U; fono figlil#Ole; tlJi ct tormcnbtno jJi ,,,,. me hora ci [ogliono t]Utgli difii tormenhtre I aeqllali go= J.ere non Ii rHO ne molto ne pom: Se fono eli qucUe di ,., fo fhtn; effi martlMigllofomcntr ci trajlullano.) pora" the ad elfo perutnllti pian4mcntr nt godiamo ' Mil terrio cbe qutLU dimora eflmpitrrlld ; fl dec credere :LlUlintUO) che huono Amore fla 'lucllo, dtl'lHale y;>de= re ft P"O ttrrn4 l nente; et reo '1ucU'altro , che etmkJl1Ilti If ci Q)ntlatln4 a cloltre ' . Q...!!:tfk Q)fo ra'l!01Jl$" ttmi. J.al fonto huomo ; pe'/'ao che trmpo era, che io rm diPdrhffi ; effo mllicrntio, I lche pl>{cta che htbbt de~ LlUlintllo; a fooi raf}on4mmti pofo fine '

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The diffusion of literature in Renaissance Italy Dante had still wider consequences for the history of the Italian book and of Italian literature: their octavo format and their more strictly Tuscan language offered a model that became widely adopted in many other editions of these two poets and spread outwards and downwards to influence other Italian books of verse, including (since it was economical to imitate) those by contemporary writers of a more popular appealY Throughout the rest of his life, Bembo continued to use the book, both manuscript and printed, in order to further his literary programme, and also for his self-fashioning, in the interests of his own career. This latter aspect came to the fore again in the mid- I 530s, when he was endeavouring to become a cardinal in the wake of a series of crushing defeats in elections to posts in the Venetian state. The challenge that he faced at this point, in using the book to seek promotion within the Church, is illustrated by a pasquinade of not later than 1533 that a~vised him to leave aside his Asolani, 'rythmi' and 'cantilenae', in other words hlS amorous writings, and to embrace instead 'sacras literas' .4' Following the election of Paul III in 1534, Bembo decided to cultivate the pope's young grandson, cardinal Alessandro Farnese, in order to underline his own status as the most respected living writer in both Latin and the vernacular. The first part of his strategy was to prepare an edition, printed under his supervision in 1536, of the L.atin letters that he had written in the name of Pope Leo X, thus demonstrating hlS mastery of Ciceronian Latin while at the same time giving a reminder of his p~st service to the papal curia. Bembo commissioned and presented a number of glft copies of the edition, including one bound in blue for the cardinal and another in red for the pope. 43 However, Bembo had to use the written word more carefully if he wished his vernacular writings to advance his career in the Church, and he therefore chose the medium of manuscript when offering a collection of his Rime to Alessandro in 1537. 44 Bembo was duly appointed cardinal towards the end of 1538. His nomination described him as the leader of his age in learning and eloquence,4s and no doubt his gifts of his works to the Farnese family had helped in the process. Ironically, once a cardinal, Bembo Could no longer use the medium of print, even to publish his history of Venice. 46 But now he simply took a long-term view, and in his last two wills (of 1535 and 1544) invited his executors to publish posthumous editions of his works. 47 The relationships between book history and the history of Italian literary culture can thus involve influences that work in both directions. On the one hand, although Bembo was neither a printer nor a professional publisher, he indirectly shaped the wider developments in the portability and readability of books that took place during the first half of the sixteenth century. On the other hand, if Bembo had not ensured that his works appeared in forms, whether handwritten Or printed, that were sought after by the most influential readers, then it would surely not have been possible for him to have exercised such a decisive cultural influence over his contemporaries and then over later generations. His careful Use of the written text as a desirable, collectable object, his control over the forms

BRIAN RICHARDSON

in which his works were diffused and the channels through which they were diffused, were indispensable factors in the creation of a new literature and language that was to be Italian rather than regionally based. The case of Pietro Bembo, in short, is one of those that illustrate how the history of the book can play an integral part in the making of literary and linguistic history, and how the separation of the two disciplines can only impoverish them both. NOTES 1

2

3

4 5

6 7 8

9 10 II

12

13

14 15

Annali di Gabriel Giolito de' Ferrari da Trino di Monferrato stampatore in Venezia, 2 vols (Rome: Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione, 1890-95). This remarkable work is a rich source of information for the intellectual life of the period as well as for the Giolito firm itself. See respectively Carlo Dionisotti, 'Chierici e laici', repro in his Geograjia e storia della letteratura italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1967), pp. 47-73 (esp. pp. 47-8), and 'La letteratura italiana nell'eta del concilio di Trento', ibid., pp. 183-204 (esp. p. 197). On the extent of the separation between Italian philology and the history of the book, see Luigi Balsamo, 'Bibliologia e filologia umanistica', in Sui libro bolognese del Rinascimento, ed. by Luigi Balsamo and Leonardo Quaquarelli (Bologna: CLUEB, 1994), pp. 7-26 (esp. pp. 7-8). Armando Petrucci, 'Introduzione: Per una nuova storia del libro' , in Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, La nascita del libro, trans. by Carlo Pischedda, ed. by Armando Petrucci, 2 vols (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1977), I, v-xlviii (orig. edn Paris: Albin Michel, 1958). Aldo Manuzio editore: dediche, preJazioni, note ai testi, intro. by Carlo Dionisotti, ed. and trans. Giovanni Orlandi, 2 vols (Milan: II Polifilo, 1976). Martin Lowry, The World ojAldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979); Italian trans. II mondo di Aldo Manuzio: afJari e cultura nella Venezia del Rinascimento (Rome: II Veltro, 1984). Lowry, The World ojAldus Manutius, p. 2. Ibid., p. 147· "'Mercanzia d'onore", "mercanzia d'utile": produzione libraria e lavoro intellettuale a Venezia nel Cinquecento', in Libri, editori e pubblico nell'Europa moderna: guida storica e critica, ed. by Armando Petrucci (Bari: Laterza, 1977), pp. 51-104. 'La letteratura in tipografia', in Letteratura ita/iana, dir. by Alberto Asor Rosa (Turin: Einaudi, 1982-91), II, 555-686. Ibid., p. 557. Ibid., pp. 676-82. Ibid., pp. 654-76. Earlier studies include Ghino Ghinassi, 'Correzioni editoriali di un gram matico cinquecentesco', Studi diji/%gia ita/iana, 19 (1961), 33-93; Ghinassi, 'L'ultimo revisore del "Cortegiano"', Studi di ji/ologia italiana, 21 (1963), 217-64; Bruno Migliorini, Storia della lingua italiana, 5th edn (Florence: Sansoni, 1978; first edn 1969), pp. 376-8. L"Orlando jurioso' del 1532: profilo di una edizione (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1989). Paolo Trovato, Con ogni diligenza corretto: la stampa e Ie revisioni editorial; de; test; lettera,; italiani (1470-1570) (Bologna: II Mulino, 1991), pp. 307-20. Leading studies include Daniel Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic: The Canonization oj

186

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16

17

18

19 20 21

22

23

24

25 26

'Orlando furioso '(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 199 I); Gino Belloni, Laura tra Petrarca e Bembo: studi sui commento umanistico-rinascimentale al 'Canzoniere' (Padua: Antenore, 1992); William J. Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). Armando Petrucci, 'Aile origini dellibro moderno: libri da banco, libri da bisaccia, iibri da mano', Italia medioevale e umanistica, J2 (1969), 295-313; repro with revisions in Libri, scrittura e pubblico nel Rinascimento: guida storica e crifica, ed. by Armando Petrucci (Bari: Laterza, 1979), pp. 137-56. 'The View from Another Planet: Textual Bibliography and the Editing of SixteenthCentury Italian Texts', Italian Studies, 34 (1979), 7J-C)2 (pp. 71-3 on Italian textual criticism; quotation from p. 92). 'Introduzione alIa bibliografia testuale', La Bibliojilia, 82 (1980), 151-80. These two texts are collected, and the first is translated, in Fahy, Saggi di bibliograjia testuale (Padua: Antenore, 1988), pp. 1-32, 33-63. In 1987 there appeared in Italy an anthology of studies on the textual criticism of printed texts, including translations of studies by W. W. Greg, Fredson Bowers, Fahy and others: La jilologia dei testi a stampa, ed. by Pasquale Stoppelli (Bologna: II Mulino, 1987). On the influence of textual bibliography in Italy, see Conor Fahy, 'Old and New in Italian Textual Criticism', in Voice, Text, Hypertext: Emerging Practices in Textual Studies, ed. by Raimonda Modiano, Leroy F. Searle and Peter Shillingsburg (Seattle and London: Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities in association with University of Washington Press, 2004), pp. 401-1 I (esp. pp. 407-8). Luigi Balsamo, La stampa in Sardegna nei secoli XV e XVI con appendice di documenti e annali (Florence: Olschki, 1968), p. X. Balsamo, 'Bibliologia e filologia umanistica', pp. 9-10. For an outline of these topics see Brian Richardson, 'Print or Pen? Modes of Written Publication in Sixteenth-Century Italy', Italian Studies, 59 (2004), 39-64, and Richardson, "'Recitato e cantato": The Oral Diffusion of Lyric Poetry in SixteenthCentury Italy', in Theatre, Opera, and Performance in Italy from the Fifteenth Century to the Present: Essays in Honour of Richard Andrews, ed. by Brian Richardson, Simon Gilson and Catherine Keen (Leeds: Society for Italian Studies, 2004), pp. 67-82. Studies of the collaboration between Bembo and Aldus include Carlo Dionisotti, Gli umanisfi e il volgarefra Quattro e Cinquecento (Florence: Le Monnier, 1968), pp. 1-14; Dionisotti, Aldo Manuzio umanista e editore (Milan: II Polifiio, 1995), esp. pp. 124-35; Cecil H. Clough, 'Pietro Bembo's Edition of Petrarch and his Association with the Aldine Press', in Aldus Manutius and Renaissance Culture: Essays in Memory of Franklin D. Murphy, ed. by David S. Zeidberg (Florence: Olschki, 1998), pp. 47-80. Bembo was said to be 'in conpagnia de dito mastro': Trovato (note 14 above), p. 159 n. 8; indeed, Bembo is named as the person who had the Petrarchs printed, in effect their publisher: 'a fato stanpare diti Petrarcha'. See too Clifford M. Brown, Isabella d'Este and Lorenzo da Pavia: Documents for the History of Art and Culture in Renaissance Mantua (Geneva: Droz, 1982), pp. 56-7. For descriptions of the editions see The Aldine Press: Catalogue of the AhmansonMurphy Collection of Books by or relating to the Press in the Library of the University of California, Los Angeles, Incorporating Works Recorded Elsewhere (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 69,76-7,92. On the innovatory nature of the editions see Trovato, pp. 143-9. Dionisotti, Gli umanisti e il volgare, p. I.

BRIAN RICHARDSON

27 Dionisotti, Aldo Manuzio umanista e editore, pp. 61, 127; Petrucci, 'Aile origini' (note 16 above), pp. 152-4; Lowry, The World ofAldus Manutius (note 5 above), pp. 146-7; Martin Davies, Aldus Manutius: Printer and Publisher of Renaissance Venice (London: The British Library, 1995), pp. 40-50. 28 Brown, pp. 55-7' 29 Not necessarily only as gift copies, as suggested by Mary Fowler, Catalogue of the Petrarch Collection Bequeathed by Willard Piske (London: Oxford University Press, 19 16), pp. 84-5· 30 Brown, p. 72. 31 M. J. c. Lowry, 'Aldus Manutius and Benedetto Bordon: in Search of a Link', Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 66 (1983-84), 173-97 (esp. pp. 188-97). The availability of some Latin works in 1505 might suggest that at least some vellum copies were printed for the general public rather than for specific customers: on this question see Lowry, ibid., p. 188, and Helena K. Szepe, 'The Book as Companion, the Author as Friend: Aldine Octavos Illuminated by Benedetto Bordon', Word (5 Image, I I (1995), 77-99 (esp. pp. 78-9). However, it seems that Petrarch was not among the authors offered to Isabella in 1505. 32 Angela Dillon Bussi, 'Le Aldine miniate della Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana', in Aldus Manutius and Renaissance Culture (note 22 above), pp. 201-16 (esp. p. 202). 33 As well as Lowry, 'Aldus Manutius and Benedetto Bordon', see Szepe, 'The Book as Companion', and Szepe, 'Bordon, Durer and Modes of Illuminating Aldines', in Aldus Manutius and Renaissance Culture, ed. by Zeidberg, pp. 185-200. Vellum copies of Dante were similarly illuminated in at least eight cases, but not apparently by Bordon: Szepe, 'The Book as Companion', p. 95 n. 66, and 'Bordon, Durer', pp. 198-9. 34 Lilian Armstrong has shown that both Aldus and Bordon were linked with the Franciscan community of San Nicolo in Venice. One of its members, Fra Urbano da Belluno, assisted Aldus in editing the Scriptores grammatic; graeci, 1496, and his Greek grammar was first printed by Aldus in 1498. Miniatures in choir books presented to the community are attributed by Armstrong to Bordon. See her 'Benedetto Bordon, Aldus Manutius and LucAntonio Giunta: Old Links and New', in Aldus Manutius and Renaissance Culture, ed. by Zeidberg, pp. 161-83. Fra Marsilio, author of a poem that praises Fra Pietro da Lucignano, guardian of the community, for having presented the books illuminated probably by Bordon (Armstrong, pp. 170-71), also wrote a poem in praise of Bembo in the Petrarch printed in Venice for Bernardino Stagnino in 1513, fol. +IV. 35 For examples, mainly Venetian, see Tammaro De Marinis, La legatura artistica in Italia nei secoli XVe XVI: notizie ed elenchi, 3 vols (Florence: Alinari, 1960), nos 1660, 1660 bis, 1729, 1730,2181 (Petrarch); 569,1734,1735,1920,2141 (Dante). 36 Giuseppe Frasso, 'Appunti sui "Petrarca" aldino del 1501', in Stud; in onore di Giuseppe Billanovich, ed. by Rino Avesani and others (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1984), pp. 315-35 (esp. p. 322). To the copies listed by Frasso can be added that described in Craig W. Kallendorf and Maria X. Wells, Aldine Press Books

at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin: A Descriptive Catalogue (Austin: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, 1998), p.80. 37 Bembo then had an apparent change of mind: most vellum copies have these lines erased either by ink or even by scraping. If the decision to erase was his, it provides a

188

The diffusion of literature in Renaissance Italy

38

39 40

41 42

reminder that it was not always easy to coordinate the use of print with one's personal motives. Frasso suggests the erasure was made because the letter signed by Aldus, and present in some copies, made these lines redundant. The erasure also took place in copies without the letter, but in two cases these were owned by people close to Bembo (Frasso, pp. 323-6). Bembo's Dante of 1502 has the same colophon for both paper and vellum copies; here the only reference to care in the reproduction of the text is the adverb 'accuratissime'. The prestige of the edition was intended to be enhanced by a dedication to Lucrezia Borgia, though a lack of coordination between composition and printing meant that some copies did not have this letter. A small number of special copies were produced: two vellum copies are listed by Cecil H. Clough, 'Pietro Bembo's GliAsolani of 1505', Modern Language Notes, 84 (1969), 16-45 (esp. pp. 33-6, 39), and there were at least two copies on large paper: De Marinis, no. 427 bis and Plate LXXV (Roman binding); The Aldine Press, p. 92. On this edition see too Fahy, Saggi, pp. 145-54. For examples, see De Marinis, nos 427 bis, 1743, 1764, 1930, 2977 ter. The eight subsequent printings of the text of the first edition (see Gli Asolani, ed. by Giorgio Dilemmi (Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 1991), pp. xviii-xxi) must have aroused mixed feelings in Bembo: they escaped the protection granted by his privilege of March 1505, but on the other hand they demonstrated the intense interest that the Aldine edition had generated. Nadia Cannata, II canzoniere a stampa (1470-1530): tradjzione e Jortuna di un genere Ira storja del /jbro e lmeratura (Rome: Bagatto Libri, 2000), pp. 65-81, 173-206. Vittorio Cian, 'Varieta letterarie del Rinascimento', in Raccolfa di studii critici dedicata

ad Alessandro D'Ancona Jesteggiandosi il XL anniversario del suo insegnamento 43 44

45 46 47

(Florence: G. Barbera, c. 1901), pp. 23-45 (esp. p. 27). Cian considers the probable author of the pasquinade to be Aretino. A binding bearing the arms of Ippolito d'Este, cardinal from 1534 to 1572, is recorded by De Marinis, no. 633. Armando Petrucci, 'Copisti e libri manoscritti dopo I'avvento della stampa', in Scrihi e coloJoni: Ie sottoscrizioni di copisti dalle origini a/l'avvento della stampa, ed. by Emma Condello and Giuseppe De Gregorio (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull' Alto Medioevo, 1995), pp. 507-25 (esp. pp. 522-3). Carlo Dionisotti, 'Pietro Bembo', in Dizionario bi()grajico degli Italiani, VIII (Rome: Istituto della Encidopedia Italiana, 1966), 133-50 (esp. p. 144). Ibid., pp. 145-6. Vittorio Cian, Un decennio della vita di M. Pietro Bemho (Turin: Loescher, 1885), pp. 201-3·

FROM LITERARY ALMANACS TO 'THICK JOURNALS' The emergence of a readership for Russian literature, I 82 os- I 84 os ABRAM REITBLAT AND CHRISTINE THOMAS

THERE IS NO TRADITION in Russia of studying the history of literature in conjunction with the history of publishing, printing, bookselling and reading. The history of literary texts and their authors, of publishing and printing, of libraries and of the teaching of literature in schools have generally been studied separately, and there have been few attempts to examine the social roles of writer, publisher, bookseller and reader (not to mention the literary critic, the censor and the librarian) as part of one whole process. In this chapter we aim for a more rounded approach in studying one aspect of the dynamic period that spans the 1820S to 1840s. This period forms a bridge between a time when Russian literature dragged out a miserable existence, virtually unknown abroad and with few readers at home, and the second half of the nineteenth century, when literature played a hugely important role in the social and cultural life of Russia (one which was to continue into the twentieth century), and writers such as Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov entered the international arena. In the 1820S to 1840S a swift and dramatic change occurred in the status of Russian literature. It gained more readers, its prestige grew among Russian readers, it found its own original native themes and became 'convertible', i.e. it began to attract the interest of foreign readers, resulting in a number of translations, anthologies and review articles published abroad. This changed status Was connected with two institutional changes in the system of Russian literature in those years - the emergence of literary almanacs and, succeeding and eventually replacing them in the mid-1830S, the 'thick journals'. The thick journals were long to remain the basis of Russian literature - the overwhelming majority of works which attracted the attention of readers were printed and reviewed in them, and a writer could not achieve popularity without being published and praised there - and it is only now that their fundamental role is coming to an end. The expansion of reading which occurred in the 1820S was conditioned by the following circumstances: The written word and literature had first come to Russia from outside (from

ABRAM REITBLAT AND CHRISTINE THOMAS

the Byzantine empire in the tenth century), and for a lengthy period reading was done mainly in Church Slavonic which was effectively a foreign language, so reading-matter was perceived as something foreign and alien. Later, in the time of Peter the Great, the government put huge efforts into spreading literacy and reading, setting up educational establishments, establishing periodical publications, and printing and distributing books. However, any private enterprise in this direction was repressed and restricted in every possible way. Unlike in Protestant countries, in Russia even those of the ordinary people who were literate rarely read the Bible; indeed, there was a popular belief among the peasantry that anyone who read the entire Bible would go mad. The discussion of religious and political questions, so important in the press of England, France and Germany and instrumental in encouraging reading among wide sections of their populations, was practically forbidden in Russia. All this meant that in the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century the printed word was still widely perceived as something both alien (though now not foreign in the sense of being culture coming from outside, but rather as emanating from the Russian state itself) and not particularly necessary. In these circumstances there was little motivation to read. Another influential factor was the geography of Russia: its extremes of climate, its vast territory, its unfriendly terrain and poor or inadequate communications systems. Transport of printed publications was difficult, which meant that they cost more, and in the absence of information about new books the mechanism of literary fashion did not operate. This situation was complicated by the cultural bilingualism of the elite, who knew not only Russian but also French (and, not infrequently, German). From the mid-eighteenth century onwards foreign books were readily available from the bookshops and private circulating libraries which had been founded in St Petersburg and Moscow, mainly by foreigners. We know of over twenty shops that either sold or lent foreign-language books in the late eighteenth century.' In the first decades of Catherine's reign, the trade had been dominated by Germans, but at the turn of the century the French were in the majority. A leading Russian outlet for foreign books was the Moscow University bookshop. Very few of the foreign eighteenth-century bookselling businesses founded in the eighteenth century survived beyond 1812; thereafter the trade was mainly in the hands of Russians: Reading at the end of the eighteenth century was mostly done in French. Among the elite, Russian publications were read by a very restricted circle (teachers and scholars, writers, and a small number of members of the clergy and the non-privileged classes). The number of subscribers to Russian books and journals rarely numbered more than two hundred. 3 Print runs of books hardly ever exceeded 1200 copies, and even the most popular editions sold only a few hundred copies in the first two or three years after publication. At the same time there are indications that between 1730 and 1800 over 300,000 people learned to read and write in educational establishments, of these about 50,000 in institutions of secondary and

From literary almanacs to 'thick journals' higher education. If we collocate these figures and compare them with the size of print-runs for books and periodicals, we will see that books were read by only a few per cent of those who were literate and - even from among those who were educated - by less than ten per cent .• Even if we assume that these figures are somewhat exaggerated, there is still a huge gap between numbers of potential readers and actual readers. In Russian literature the majority of texts were state-oriented (odes, national epics and so on). Publications touching upon personal, intimate and love themes were in the clear minority, and were acquired mainly by readers from the middle classes, who considered literature in Russian as their own (for the upper classes their literature was French). In the eighteenth century and, to a significant extent, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the system of priorities in literature was set by the Court, and Karamzin, Derzhavin, Pushkin, Zhukovsky, Krylov and other leading writers of the time enjoyed Court patronage. We should also emphasize that those who could read constituted a minority of the population; the lower classes of society (mainly peasants) were, with very few exceptions, illiterate. Thus we can identify two extreme cultural divides: between the literate and the illiterate; and between those who read in French and those who read in Russian. The Patriotic War of 1812 and the Napoleonic wars of 1813-15 fostered the emergence of a Russian national consciousness and a sense of national unity, which in turn engendered an interest in Russian culture, including literature. The notion that literature was the highest and most organic form of national expression was instilled into students. A milestone was the publication in 1818 of the first volume of Nikolai Karamzin's monumental History ofthe Russian State,S which sold out in a very short space of time and was hugely influential. It was perceived not only as a historical work but also as a work of literature, and so helped to legitimize Russian literature. Interest in literature was further strengthened by the fact that in the sphere of belles-lettres the state laid down no firm prescriptions; so they provided the only forum where debate and polemics were at all possible. To be sure, reading was not limited to printed literature, i.e. that which had been approved by the state. There was a strong manuscript tradition, different in different social classes. The Old Believers6 wrote, copied and read religious-polemical works, the Orthodox peasants read texts such as the apocryphal 'Dream of the Virgin Mary',' and political and erotic verses and poems banned by the censor circulated among the educated classes. A very important role was played by dilettante literature, which circulated among friends and found expression in autograph albums, which we will discuss in more detail below. In the second decade of the nineteenth century there was a clearly perceived need to raise the status of Russian literature and to widen its circle of readers. The existing literary journals did not and could not fulfil this role: they were oriented towards foreign literature, were rather expensive and, because of the bad postal service, often did not reach their subscribers. It was the almanac which took on the role of stimulating interest in Russian 193

ABRAM REITBLAT AND CHRISTINE THOMAS

literature. The 'Almanac period' lasted about a decade, beginning in 1823 when - in the words of a reviewer in a journal of the middle of the nineteenth century - '16mo almanacs flourished, presenting at the time of every New Year the whole of Russian belles-lettres. A few hundred pages of verse and prose excited readers, were subjected to detailed analysis in the journals of the time, and brought fame to their authors and publishers.'8 Almanacs of this period are bibliographically well documented,9 there have been two monographs on the one of the best almanacs, Severnye tsvety (Northern Flowers),IO and numerous articles on the history of the Russian almanac. II However, no research has been published on the almanac as a socio-cultural phenomenon, very few attempts have been made to understand its place in the literary system or, more broadly, the culture of its time, and practically none to view it in the context of everyday life, publishing and the book trade." We consider it important to analyse the phenomenon of the literary almanac, placing it not so much in the context of the literary situation of the time as in the socio-cultural situation, demonstrating its connections with life-styles, the requirements of readers, the processes of publishing and the book trade, and so on. We proceed from the assumption (expressed here in the words of the sociologists of reading Gudkov and Dubin) that it is necessary to bear in mind 'the existence of specific semiotic, social and semantic norms for the transmission of the text, which take into account the differences between the various social groups to which its [the almanac's] addressees and users belong'.'3 The word 'almanac' comes from Arabic: it was the name given at the end of the Middle Ages to a kind of tabular calendar with astronomical notes borrowed from the Arabs. 14 The nature of publications known as almanacs later changed repeatedly.ls In eighteenth-century France purely literary almanacs came into existence - miscellanies of new works of prose and verse - but the connection with astrology (in their names and their illustrations) and chronology (their periodicity - annual- and the time of their appearance - just before the New Year) remained. First to publish literary almanacs in Russia was the eminent eighteenthcentury prose writer Nikolai Karamzin . Following his European tour of 178990, Karamzin began to write his 'Letters of a Russian Traveller' and became known thereafter as the 'Russian Sterne'. His two almanacs were Aglaia, books 1 and 2 in 1794 and 1795 (of which he was the principal author), and Aonidy in 1796. In the preface to the first issue of Aonidy, he emphasized that it was modelled on the French Almanach des Muses. But Karamzin's initiative was not sustained and almanacs came out very rarely. It was not until the 1820S that there was a consistent call for this cultural form. In 1822 the young writers and Decembrists Aleksandr Bestuzhev (1797-1837) and Kondraty Ryleev (17951826) began to publish in St Petersburg their Po/iarnaia zvezda (Polar Star) (Figure 1) which brought together the best Russian writers of the day and was a literary (that is, favourably reviewed) and a commercial success - Bestuzhev and Ryleev made a profit of two thousand roubles on the 1825 issue. 16 It also attracted 194

From literary almanacs to 'thick journals'

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ABRAM REITBLAT AND CHRISTINE THOMAS

favourable attention at the Imperial Court: having presented the 1824 issue to the Empress, Bestuzhev and Ryleev received a signet ring and a gold snuff-box. 17 Thereafter, almanacs began to well up as if from the horn of plenty, and soon more than ten titles were coming out every year, some of them even more profitable than Polar Star. The historian and journalist Mikhail Pogodin (1800-75) 'dreamed of making around five thousand roubles' out of his Urania, published in 1825,'8 and Baron Delvig's Northern Flowers (St Petersburg) of 1828 earned him eight thousand roubles. 19 What kind of publication were these Russian almanacs? Literary historians generally characterize them as slim volumes of new works of poetry and prose; their contemporaries defined them similarly. But in order to understand the nature of the almanac it is just as important to define its function in everyday life: that is, as an elegant and rather expensive 'object', a gift (most often for the New Year), a part of the trappings of a fashionable drawing-room. So for the contemporary audience its external characteristics (format, quality of design, the time of year of its publication, etc.) were no less important and sometimes more important than its contents. The importance of external characteristics is borne out by contemporary reviews. The journalist Nikolai Grech in his 1823 review of the first issue of Polar Star observed: 'I don't like its format: it is too large for a pocket book. And what a pity that there are no pictures: they are an essential component of any almanac."o A year later on the publication of the second issue Faddei Bulgarin remarked with satisfaction: 'This year its format really is pocket size and will fit into the smallest reticule.'" Another reviewer writing in 1830 (a time when the almanac type of publication had already settled into a stable form) praised the almanac Tsarskoe selo: 'it has all the requisites of a comme il fout almanac. The format is agreeable, the paper delightfully clean, the print small, the wrapper sweetly pink, everything as usuall'u On the other hand a critical reviewer of the almanac Podarok bednym (A Gift for the Poor) writes, 'true, it calls itself an almanac, but it has none of the elements of an almanac: it didn't come out at the New Year, has no pictures, no pretty wrapper, no splendid typography, no review, no tales of popular traditions: how can it be called an almanac?,.J Both the design and content of almanacs say a lot about their readers. They were evidently people to a greater or lesser extent accustomed to European culture, not having any particular interest in Russian literature, not following it and not knowing very much about it. A revealing insight into the attitudes of the upper classes towards Russian literature is provided by Pogodin's 'Letter about Russian novels' published in Severnaia lira (Northern Lyre), 1827. It tells of a soiree at the house of a certain countess, where the conversation was about Sir Walter Scott's latest novel. 'What a pity,' said Countess 0, 'that we can't have a Walter Scott.' 'And why can't we, my dear lady?' I asked, having up until then listened in silence to our severe and pedantic critics. 'The reason is clear: we have nothing to describe: the ancient Russians were barbarians, and the new Russians are imitators. Our character has no distinguishing features, everywhere a wearisome monotony, much the same as our country, made up of

From literary almanacs to 'thick journals' endless steppes.... ' 'Yes, yes, just you tell us, what could Walter Scott find to describe here?' - exclaimed a chorus of voices, and the assembled guests turned to me with a triumphant air as if anticipating my confusion. . In reply, the author makes a long speech, in which he tries to convince his lUterlocutors on the subject of how rich in events and drama is the history of Russia, how varied its nature and the peoples which inhabit it, and exclaims: 'What a vast field is open to our Russian novelists!' Also telling are the words addressed by the publisher to his reader in the preface to one of the almanacs: 'I beg you to spare a little time to look through our almanac; I know that for many of our friends dances, cards, visits, gossip, society, even the latest novel of the Vicomte D'Arlincourt are dearer to their heart than any Russian book .... '"4 It is not inconceivable that some such readers who lived in the provinces, on their estates, far from the capitals, had no access to books or journals. The almanac aimed to provide a survey of current Russian literature to show that it was worthy of attention, and to offer to its readers a selection of the newest and, wherever possible, the best examples. The critic Petr Pletnev (1792-1865) saw the 'digest aspect' of almanacs as the main reason for their success. He remarked in 1831 that before the advent of the almanac 'every small work in verse or in prose before its eventual appearance in the collected works of an author, was usually PUblished in a journal.·5 Anyone who wanted to get a picture of what works of literature had appeared in a particular year would have to leaf through huge piles of journals. So as to turn what was a troublesome chore into a very useful pastime, writers began to publish almanacs, devoting them exclusively to belles-Iettres...6 By the second half of the 1820S and the early 1830S almanacs had become fashionable and it was prestigious to be published in them. One of the reasons for their success was that they found one particular new audience for Russian literature: women of the upper classes. Previously the potential reader of books had been an educated man, a fact which determined their subject-matter and physical characteristics: size, format, how the text was transmitted, etc. By the 1820S thousands of women had been educated, in the institutes for noble girls and boarding schools that began to appear at the end of the eighteenth century or at home. They, unlike men, had a good deal of free time and they read a lot (albeit in French). Almanac publishers took account of their tastes, interests, and requirements. Therefore the 'pocket book', as almanacs were often called, was of a size which enabled a lady of society to put it in her handbag, to take it with her when she visited her circle of friends, and to use it as a topic of conversation in the salon. The almanac, in its capacity as a present, became an element of everyday life: it provided models for salon literature and a source for texts which could be inscribed in autograph albums."7 In contrast with the books and journals of the time, the almanac was profusely illustrated, normally with many engravings of reasonably high quality. This made it attractive to the reader with not much experience of reading literature who could, while reading, look at the illustrations and at the intricate vignettes and head-pieces. As far as contents were concerned, the main genres to be found in Russian almanacs were love lyrics, 197

ABRAM REITBLAT AND CHRISTINE THOMAS

society and historical tales, fragments, moralistic essays, excerpts from longer· works and - frequently - a review of the year's literature. Thus, with regard for the potential female audience, themes relating to personal lives and love predominated (as opposed to a focus on the state, the nation, society, religion). There was also an attempt to acquaint the reader with the history of Russia, its specific characteristics, and this not in learned articles but in popular form, in prose sketches and essays. The publishers of the almanac Polar Star hoped that 'by not frightening people off with dry erudition, it will find its way to domestic firesides, onto occasional tables, perhaps ladies' dressing tables and to the bedsides of beautiful women. We should use all such opportunities to acquaint our public as much as possible with Russian antiquity, with our native literature, with our writers. ,.s The encouragement of the Empress, mentioned above, helped to make the almanac fashionable among the aristocracy, and from there it spread to wider circles of readers, who took their models of behaviour from 'on high'. Almanac publishers often stressed the fact that they were aiming to appeal to women. This could be done in the title (for example S. N. Glinka's 'Moscow Almanac for the Fair Sex 1826') or in the dedication, for example 'To Moscow beauties' in the almanac Venok gratsii (Wreath of the Graces) (Moscow, 1828). A particular role in the success of almanacs was played by another medium through which Russian literature penetrated into the sphere of women's reading -literary autograph albums, popular among the nobility in the first decade of the nineteenth century. The popularity of these albums was connected with such social institutions as literary salons and circles of friends (this, in conditions of increased leisure and the growth of the significance of 'culture' and of 'education'). Circles of friends and salons created important pre-conditions for writing in albums: social intercourse and an atmosphere conducive to artistic creation. >9 The St Petersburg literary critic Vadim Vatsuro (1935-2000), perhaps the most perceptive commentator on the Golden Age of Russian literature, argues that a prerequisite of the formation of the album genre is 'the existence of a particular literary milieu or purlieu, which is formed around the owner of the album and leaves its traces on the pages of the album'.30 The album has a dual function. It documents memorable events and encounters in the life of its owner and, being intended for showing around, in displaying the compliments which have been made to him or her and witnessing to his/her acquaintanceship with notable people, it raises the prestige of its owner. Vatsuro notes that The intimate album for friends of the ISIOS gradually gives way to the 'public' album, a collection of autographs of famous people, from a 'memento of friendship' it turns into a testimony to the owner's broad cultural horizons .... The 'fashionable album' was a symptom of a time when a knowledge of Russian literature and an acquaintance with Russian writers had become prestigious. 3 '

Together with the increasing popularity of albums, there was a growing vogue

From literary almanacs to 'thick journals' for commonplace books into which the owner would copy favourite verses from printed and manuscript sources. Given all this, it is not surprising that almanacs also became popular; they were, after all, a kind of 'printed album', similar to the album in format (most albums were also 16mo), in design (a lot of space in an album was occupied by drawings, vignettes etc.), and in content. Besides which, models were needed for Copying (or adapting) in an album, and the almanacs provided these (they often published 'album-type' verse). One further point must be noted. The album was something which emanated from a circle of intimates, and it was people from this narrow circle - acquaintances or relatives - who wrote in it and read it. The almanac preserved in part this characteristic. It was produced by a group of people who knew one another other well and were from similar backgrounds and who often held similar views on literature. It contained greetings and dedications from friends, demonstrating its provenance from a particular circle. Furthermore, because of the small size of its readership - as for any book of the time an appreciable number of its readers were members of the circle in which the almanac had originated, their friends and relatives, and writers who were well acquainted with what went on behind the scenes, so could decipher the cryptonyms of authors and dedicatees of many of the texts. This was not altogether surprising, given the small community of writers that existed at the time. At a time of dramatic change both in the predominant aesthetic principles (classicism was giving way to romanticism) and in the organizational forms of literary life, the almanac enabled a group of writers, close in background and in their aesthetic views, to unite and to step into the literary arena together, supporting one another and widening their circle of readers. Unlike women's journals (and some others, such as The Telescope and the Moscow Telegraph) which published a profusion of prose in translation, the almanac saw as its mission the promotion of Russian literature and native writers, so included very few translations. The almanac was a form which served to embed Russian literature in the lives of wide segments of the population, not only the nobility, but the merchant class, the lower middle classes, civil servants and so on. This, partly, because it was often given as a present. It was noted in the press in 1828 that 'it was becoming the custom to present almanacs to young ladies and women, that is, relations of course, for Christmas and New Year ... '.3a The milieu in which almanacs circulated was wide and comparatively large. Thus the tactics of the almanac publishers proved to be effective. Through women the almanac (and with it, Russian literature) penetrated into everyday life. And women in their turn brought up their children and introduced them to Russian literature (from the 1 840S it even began to be taught in schools), which meant that by the middle of the nineteenth century the social status of Russian literature had risen dramatically. Vissarion Belinsky (1811-48), the first professional Russian literary critic, observed that

199

ABRAM REITBLAT AND CHRISTINE THOMAS

the success of the first almanac gave rise to a multitude of others. It cost nothing to put them together, and they brought considerable fame and money. Some gentleman who'd never written anything in his life would suddenly decide to immortalize his name with a great literary feat: you blink and, 10 and behold, another almanac has come out. A slender little volume, but it costs only ten rouble notes, and immediately sells out. So in return for big money and great fame the publisher had to layout only the sum needed to cover paper and printing costs. How was this done? Very simply. The publisher would approach all the big names of the time from Pushkin to Mr F. Glinka, and would receive something from them all- from one a poem, from another a five-page excerpt from a novel, from another a rambling little article about this that and the other, and so on. The main thing in an almanac was to have five or six well-known names, it was easy to recruit dozens of scribblers. At that time hack writers not only asked for no payment for their scribbling, they were even willing to pay for the honour of seeing their work and their name in print. 33 The almanac divided the literary milieu into two layers - dilettante writers who wrote out of vanity, and professional writers who, to a greater or lesser extent, lived on their literary earnings. But the main thing was not that some writers grew richer on the proceeds of literature, but that among writers the notion occurred and took root that literature could be a source of income, and not a bad one at that. In the next stage of development the thick journals (the first being Biblioteka dlia chtenjia) began to pay fairly high fees to almost all its contributors (except for beginners), and at a set rate. So, the era of almanacs was the transitional period from literary circles and salons (as organizational forms of literary life) to journals and their editorial offices. The almanac was the means which served to professionalize literature, and to put into place new kinds of links within the literary milieu and between writers and the public. It also widened the audience for reading and got fairly broad layers of the educated classes into the habit of reading belles-lettres. It is difficult to overestimate its contribution to the reorientation of the reading public from foreign to Russian literature. As soon as there was a sufficient number of professional writers who looked to receive money for their work, and a sufficient number of readers ready to pay in order to read their works, there arose the possibility of founding journals which were based on Russian literature. The synthetic nature of the almanac and the fact that it was addressed to a number of different audiences also played a role. The almanac combined a number of traditions: printed text and handwritten album, text for reading and pictures to look at, interest in things foreign and interest in things Russian. The 'almanac period' came to an end in the mid-I830s and the thick journals, Library for Reading (Biblioteka dlia chteniia), Notes of the Fatherland (Otechestvennye zapiski) and The Contemporary (Sovremennjk) came to the fore. They were fundamentally different in character from almanacs and from the journals of the first third of the nineteenth century. Normally monthly, they were of larger format, most often octavo, and could be up to 500 pages long, so that the volume of text in a thick journal within a year was dozens of times greater than 200

From literary almanacs to 'thick journals' ~hat of the almanac. The texts that were published were also longer (they Included serializations of quite lengthy novels), and the contents were very varied: travel accounts, memoirs, learned articles on history, economics, law, reviews and works of literary criticism and so on. They were addressed to a more sophisticated and educated audience than the almanacs, and had hardly any illustrations. If the purchaser of the almanac regarded Russian literature (or, more precisely, literature in the Russian language) as a rare and exotic product, then the readers of the thick journals were people who read a lot, either exclusively or predominantly in Russian. They were readers with varied interests, and the journals aimed to cater for all their requirements regarding reading-matter. This universality is reflected in the title of the first such journal: 'The Circulating Library' (Biblioteka dNa chteniia, sometimes translated as 'Library for Reading'), founded in 1834 (Figure 2). Journal readers were students from the capitals, University professors, teachers in gymnasia and other educational establishments and, above all, country landowners. The thick journal suited perfectly this new reading audience of families of country landowners, since it provided a quantity of reading-matter, sufficiently varied to suit different members of the family, and could be easily obtained - by post. 34 The 'Circulating Library' was aimed at just SUch an audience and, with a subscription list of between 5000 and 7000, was the most successful undertaking in journalism up to that time. J5 In common with the almanac, one characteristic of the thick journal was that it was generally linked with a particular world outlook. Maguire states that one of the traits which define the genre (apart from 'compendiousness ... a lively criticism, and a predominance of prose') is 'a definite ideology'.J6 For example, Otechestvennye zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland), founded in 1839, was the leading journal of the Westerners, a position later taken over by The Contemporary (Sovremennik), which Push kin helped to launch in 1836, the year before his death, and which was to become the most famous and widely read literary journal in nineteenth-century Russia. By the late 1840s, the thick journals had gained the respect of Russian intellectuals and had come to dominate Russian cultural life. It is possible to pinpoint specific features of literary communication via the almanac - as opposed to the monograph, on the one hand, and the journal, on the other), to establish differences in terms of temporal dimensions. If the journal establishes a continuous link - on a monthly or more frequent basis between writers and the reader or group of readers and the book provides a oneoff contact with the writer (though popular books in parts can create a more sustained relationship), then the almanac offers periodic contact with a variety of writers - given that many almanacs brought out a continuation, normally a year later. At a time of radical change in the field of literature, the almanac permitted the renewal of links which had been broken between writers and readers, though in a more fluid form than the journal. It offered rough indications of, and tentative approaches to, the new and the modern, firmed up only later. Thus it is possible to claim that the almanac is an intermediate, transitional phenomenon, which serves to, one, bring reading to new socio-cultural layers of the 201

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Jacques Hebert innov~tion in publishing certainly affects the intellectual content of the book but also its

~atertal ~orm, its budgetary structure (articulating the notion that larger print runs mean OWer prIces), and its distribution requirements. Located at the heart of the established ~ystem, the industrial publisher is someone who conceives the new product to be a.un~hed onto the market, who asserts a publishing policy, and who sees it through to dIstrtbution - whether it is for books as such or for magazines and newspapers.19

~y keeping the price of his books relatively low, Hebert succeeded in maintain-

~ng a ba~ance between the publication of works of general interest and of more em~ndmg literary works, and in this way countered the foreign competition ~m~lpresent in the Quebec market. This balance was to be upset by events unng the mid-1970S as discussed above. b Jacques Hebert's departure coincided with several important changes in the ook world which was, at the time, experiencing a crisis: production was falling, ~ve~ag~ print-runs were in continuous decline, and the prices of books were eglOntng to soar. Many cultural publishers were forced to leave and to cede their pla~e to administrators:o The publishing houses which then evolved were those ~hlch favoured standardized production: novels with mass ,appeal, children's ~oks, practical guides and dictionaries. The reconversion of Editions du Jour in ~ e practical book sector was symbolic in this regard. The capital from Editions ~ Jour was henceforth integrated into a business that was expanding in a sector ~ activity which would see half of its produc~ion sold abroad." We are here far ~om the editorial policy of the founder of the Editions du Jour and the publisher ~ the Insolences du jrere Un tel, who conceived publication as an act of provocatlO~ aimed at inciting public opinion. After the departure of Jacques Hebert, Writers turned to the small publishing houses that were to experience an ~Phemeral existence until the adoption of Bill 51 relaunched the book industry mQuebec. NOTES I

2

3 4 5

6

Jacques Hebert, Ecrire en 13 points Garamond (Paroisse Notre-Dame-des-neiges, Quebec: Editions Trois-Pistoles, 2002), p. 90. Hebert 'Pour moi, publier un livre, c'est une fete', La Presse, 10 May 1969, p. 35. See Hisloire de ['edition litteraire au Quebec au XXe siec/e, gen. ed. Jacques Michon, vol. 2: Le Temps des Miteurs, 1940-1959 (Montreal: Fides, 2004), pp. 287-322. Alain Fournier, Les Insolences dufrere Unte!: Un best-seller de la Revolution tranquille ([Sainte-Foy]: CRELIQ, 1988). The first title published by Les Editions de I'Homme was a pamphlet written by Hebert himself in which he committed himself to fight for a review of this trial. Although Hebert did not realize it at the time, his pamphlet entitled Coffin est innocent Was the first example of the publishing format which was to establish his reputation. 12,000 copies were sold in several months and it was so successful that Hebert decided to launch other similar titles monthly with the help of his printer Edgar Lesperance. In order of popularity, these works were: Les Insolences du frere Unte!, Pourquoi suis-je un separatiste by Marcel Chaput, Les Fous crient au secours by Jean-Charles Page and Le Chretien et les elections by Louis O'Neill and Gerard Dion. (From an unpublished

30 5

JACQUES MICHON

7

8 9 10 I I

I2 13

14

15 16 17 18 19

20

compilation by Claude Martin, Department of Sociology, Montreal University.) See Keay Dyer, Denis Saint-Jacques and Claude Martin, 'Best-Sellers', in History of the Book in Canada, volume III: /9/8-/980, edited by Carole Gerson and Jacques Michon, Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2007, pp. 462-3. Jean Pare, 'Anatomie d'un succes: II ne faut pas craindre Ie serieux', Le Nouveau Journal, 7 April 1962, p. viii. See Claude Janelle, Les Editions du Jour, une generation d'ecrivain (Montreal: Hurtubise HMH, 1983). Pare, 'Anatomie d'un succes', p. viii. Germain Lesage, Notre eveil culturel (Montreal: Rayonnement, 1963), p. 57. Jacques Michon, 'L'edition du roman quebecois, 1961-1974: Les Editions du Jour et Ie Cercle du livre de France' in Le roman quebecois depuis /960: Methodes et analyses, ed. by Louise Milot and Jaap Lintvelt (Sainte-Foy: Les Presse de I'Universite Laval, 1992), pp. 299-3 16. Advertisement in La Presse, 4 April 1964, p. 3. Jacques Hebert, Obscenite et Jiberte (Montreal: Editions du Jour, 1972), p. 74 contains a plea against literary censorship followed by extracts from the defence speeches and verdicts of several famous trials including Lady Chatterley's Lover, Histoire d'O and five works by the Marquis de Sade. Preface by Maitre Claude-Armand Sheppard. For further details of the circumstances surrounding this rupture, c( Victor-Levy Beaulieu, Les Mots des autres: La Passion d'Miter (Montreal: VLB editeur, 2001) and Jacques Hebert, Ecrire en /3 points Garamond (Paroisse Notre-Dame-des-neiges, Q!iebec: Editions Trois-Pistoles, 2002). Pierre de Bellefeuille, Alain Pontaut et aI, La Bataille du livre, oui Ii la culture fran;aise, non au colonialisme culturel (Montreal: Lemeac, 1972), pp. 27, 33. Ibid., p. 32. See Jacqueline Gerols, Le roman quebicois en France (Montreal: Hurtubise HMH, 1984), pp. 137, 140-1. Jacques Hebert, 'Robert Laffont: Le plus quebecois des editeurs fran~ais .. .', Le Devoir, 2 March 1974, p. 16. 'L'innovation editoriale porte, certes, sur Ie contenu intellectuel du livre, mais aussi sur sa forme materielle, sur sa structure budgetaire (avec I'articulation hausse des tiragesl baisse des prix) et sur les conditions de sa diffusion. Au creur du systeme qui se met en place, I'editeur industriel est celui qui imagine Ie produit nouveau a lancer sur Ie marche, qui definit une politique editoriale et qui en conduit la realisation complete jusqu'a la diffusion - qu'il s'agisse de livres proprement dits ou de periodiques et de journaux', Frederic Barbier, 'D'une mutation I'autre: Les temps longs de I'histoire du livre', Revuefran;aise d'histoire du livre, nos 106-9 (2000),17. Jacques Michon, 'L'edition litteraire saisie par Ie marchC', Communication, I2.1

(199 1),29-47. 21 Pierre Racine, 'Le Roi dufast-book', L'At'tualite (August 1985), 20, 23.

306

CREATING AN ENGLISH LITERARY CANON, 1679-1720 Jacob Tonson, Dryden and Congreve JOHN BARNARD

~HE

REASONS FOR THE EMERGENCE of the English literary canon in the eighteenth century, and its significance, are currently a contentious issue. A consensus locates its creation in the middle to late years of the century. What follows will focus on issues raised by two recent books, and will argue that pUblishers, authors and the workings of the book trade need to be re-integrated Into the study of the origins of the English canon. I . Despite its sub-title, 'Print Capitalism and the Cultural Past 1700-1770', Jonathan Brody Kramnick's Making the English Canon at no point refers to a publisher or the mechanisms of the book trade.' Rather, he argues that the critical writing on Shakespeare, Spenser and Milton in the first part of the eighteenth century mark the beginnings of literary study, and therefore of the canon. In ~997 Richard Terry made the radical claim that canon formation and the rank~g of writers by their literary merit is evident from the Elizabethans onwards. b e~ry's argument was met with fierce resistance. 3 In particular, he challenged the . ehef that because the word 'literature' only developed its modern meaning of Imaginative writing ('creative writing') from the 1760s onwards the concept of canonicity and, indeed, of 'literature', cannot have existed earlier. Terry's argument that the canon and 'literature' both exist avant Ie mot is reformulated in his ~ubsequent book, Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past 1660-1781, . Ut he expressly excludes any consideration of publishers, commercial or Institutional processes, or the battles over literary copyright. 4 r This is to fight with one hand behind his back, if only because imaginative Iterature was a category recognized by the book trade. The Term Catalogues (1668 to 1709), a quarterly trade journal equivalent to Books in Print, included a r~gular section headed 'Poetry and Plays', or sometimes simply 'Poetry', incluSIV~ ~f plays. This establishes an obvious point, the crucial role of publishers as faclhtators and brokers - facilitators because they are responsible for financing publication, cultural brokers because they see and exploit openings in the contemporary market and mediate between authors and potential readers. More substantial proof supporting Terry's argument is provided by the c~llaboration between the publisher, Jacob Tonson, first with Dryden and later With Congreve. The mutually beneficial relationship between these three men shows them actively establishing a 'polite' canon of poetry and drama between

JOHN BARNARD

1679 and 1720. In discussing Tonson and Congreve I will draw on D. F. McKenzie's elegant analysis of their partnership in his major article, 'Typography and Meaning: The Case of William Congreve', first printed in Germany in 1981.5 It is an example which ought by now have fed into these current discussions of canon formation, but has yet to do so. I will also be refer6 ring to Paul Hammond's recent chapter on the making of the Restoration canon. McKenzie's insistence on the need to study the materiality of texts means, in this instance, concentrating on the choice of formats and the reprinting of authors' works in multi-volume sets. Reprinting is, of course, a necessary precondition for all canon formation. (Needless to say, the establishment of literary hierarchies involves larger cultural forms like matters of copyright, competing literary genres, education, social institutions and so on.) Jacob Tonson's connection with Dryden began in 1679 when, as a young bookseller aged twenty-four, he published Troilus and Cressida, the beginning of a relationship which lasted until Dryden's death in 1700.7 Beginning in the 1690s, William Congreve, regarded by Dryden as his literary heir, worked closely with Dryden and Tonson. It is important to note the sharp difference in the three men's politics. From 1688 Dryden was a Jacobite and a Catholic, a man in internal exile and out of political favour, sharply opposed to the Whig politicS of both Tonson and Congreve. Tonson's career coincides with the transitional period in which a nation still deeply divided in terms of politics, religion, social structures and culture moved from the turmoil of the years of Stuart rule towards an uneasy stability in the early years of the eighteenth century. In 1688 the Catholic king,James II, fled, to be replaced by William and Mary (as a result of which Dryden lost his government posts). William III committed the country to expensive continental wars for the next two decades. The Bank of England, founded in 1694 to resolve the consequent financial crisis and to fund the army, confirmed the City's power as the country's financial dynamo. At the same time trade, including the book trade, with the American colonies was increasingly important in establishing England'S emergent commercial imperialism. These years also saw the end of the Licensing Act in 1695, the passing of the Copyright Act of 1709, and the Union with Scotland. In the same years there was a shift from the earlier Court-dominated culture towards an increasing commodification of the arts, which widened the audience for literature. By the time Dryden, then aged forty-eight, began to work with Tonson, he had established himself as a literary arbiter through the example of his own poetry and plays, but equally forcibly through the extensive use of essays, prefaces and dedications to define his own literary agenda, to defend his own artistic practices, and to attack his enemies, both literary and political. He created the Augustan literary standard by which his own work was to be judged. The stance he adopted was that of a man educated in the classics, up to the minute with French literature and literary theory, and capable of creating a specifically English aesthetic which married the English virtues of variety and naturalness

308

Creating an English literary canon, 1679-1720 (exe~plified by Shakespeare) with those of classical and contemporary, and, in particular, French, neoclassical ideals of correctness (an enterprise in which he Was followed by Congreve).8 Harold Love rightly describes Dryden as mediating a new relationship between Court, Country, City and the 'Town'.9 The Great Fire of 1666 hastened the development of the fashionable West End between the City and Westminster (the seat of the Court and Parliament). The effect was to create a new fashionable London in parallel to the City. It was characterized by regularly laid out ~quares and sociable spaces like the New Exchange in the Strand (where the ookseller, Henry Herringman, had his shop), Will's Coffee House in Russell Street (where Dryden held court), its playhouses, and, above all, by its new oPPOrtunities for leisure. But the real financial power had moved decisively to the unfashionable City. Nevertheless, the hereditary landowning class held on to cultural and political power by forging a cultural alliance between the Town ~nd the country against the mercantilism of the City: ironically enough the A~gustan' cultural values embodied in Dryden's writings and Tonson's publicatIOn of a 'polite' literary canon depended on the wealth generated by the City. Two examples of the collaboration between Tonson and Dryden serve to demonstrate how together the two men helped to create a clearly defined 'polite' ~eadership. These are the series of original poetry anthologies they published rO,m 1684 onwards and Dryden's Virgil (1697). The first, the Dryden-Tonson M,scellanies of contemporary writers, established the literary anthology of new P~ems as a genre which was to be a formative feature in constructing the elgh~eenth-century canon. In all, six volumes of Dryden's Miscellany were published, the first two in 1684 and 1685, called, respectively, Miscellany Poems ~nd Sylvae, with the third and fourth parts, entitled Examen Poeticum and the nnual Miscellany, appearing in 1693 and 1694. Two further parts appeared in 17 0 4 and 1709 after Dryden's death, but still carried his name. The variation in t~e volumes' titles point to the experimental nature of the project, in particular t e apparent promise in 1694 that the publication was about to mutate into an annual series. The Miscellanies were active in several directions at once. Between 1684 and 16~4 they gave a space for gentleman authors and more serious writers to display tf elr. abilities. They increasingly focused on translations of passages from the c asslCS, and allowed Dryden, along with other mainly younger writers, to demonstrate his talents as a translator. The translations appealed to the knowledgeable, who could compare different versions of the same passage. '0 They are p~rt of a pattern which established that English poetry could measure up to the ~ allenge of the classics, a pattern also evident in Dryden'S own writing and in onson's broader publishing programme. Tonson was responding to what he sensed was a literary trend, but was also creating an audience, which he further Illet through the separate publication, with Dryden's help and contribution, of translations of the works of classical authors. The series of Miscellanies and these other translations gave Dryden and Tonson powers of cultural patronage over

30 9

JOHN BARNARD

their contributors, whether aristocratic amateurs or ambitious young men, like Joseph Addison and Congreve, both of whom were involved, in differing ways, in the publication of Dryden's translation of Virgil a few years later. At the same time translations made the classics available to those without a classical education, holding a particular appeal for women readers, an increasingly important constituency from the 1690S onwards in the establishment of literary and theatrical taste. All four early volumes were published in octavo and were well produced. The Annual Miscellany for 1694, unlike play quartos or periodicals, is markedly uneconomic in its use of white space. It is over three hundred pages long, but its pages contain only eighteen leaded lines in large type (English) and also has an engraved title-page. For Tonson's purchasers expense mattered less than appearance. The Annual Miscellany was an object valued as much for its aesthetic as its literary properties. Dryden's and Tonson's miscellanies were produced for a leisured middle-class reading public whose taste the series helped define. II In their format and typography they look to the future. Dryden's and Tonson's creation of an ostensibly apolitical literary arena had to pass over contemporary realities. Paul Hammond points out that Poems on Affairs ofState, published from 1697 onwards, a sequence of anthologies largely drawn from the satires on the reigns of Charles II and James II (which had circulated only in manuscript) creating an opposing canon. U What these volumes claimed to provide was 'a just and secret History of the former times', promoting a partisan Williamite account of recent history, part of whose purpose was the 'mischievous reconfiguration' of Dryden's own canon. Poems on Affairs of Stale were published after the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695. The consequent rapid growth in the number of newspapers and periodicals meant that by the 1710S, a period I will be looking at later, there was a highly politicized press. From 1703 Defoe was publishing pamphlets and the Review on behalf of Robert Harley; in 1710 Bolingbroke established the weekly Tory Examiner, with Swift as a contributor, which was answered by Addison's Whig Examiner (1710). This party-political, and frequently savage, journalism has an antithetical relationship to the aesthetic arena claimed by Dryden's Miscellanies and translation of Virgil. Nevertheless, the Miscellanies prepared the ground for Dryden's translation of Virgil (1697), which proved highly profitable for both author and publisher. The Virgifs format is conventional, a large folio, embellished with 101 engravings, and looked old-fashioned within a few years (Figures 1-2). However, the volume is innovatory in one crucial respect: it is the first work of a living writer published by subscription. '3 The venture is a remarkable example of 'high' cultural production dependent on the symbiotic relationship between author, publisher and patrons (who were also its readers), on commercial considerations, and on the support it received from conflicting political, economic and social formations. The translation presents itself as a patriotic endeavour uniting its readers in an aesthetic realm which transcended the divisive political and religious tensions of the 1690S. The list of 349 subscribers brings together divided, but also over-

310

Creating an English literary canon, 1679-1720 lapping, constituencies of readers. It includes a significant body of those holding the major state offices, several of whom belonged to the Kit-Cat Club, an influential Whig grouping of mainly younger men. To that extent it might be read as a Whig project supporting the Williamite settlement of 1688. But among the MPs who subscribed there is an almost even split between those who belonged to the opposition and those who were government supporters; there is also a smaller body of Catholics and Jacobite sympathisers. Subscribers are drawn from the army, navy, church and universities, but they also come from two new constituencies. One of these is women readers, the other City merchants and financiers. The involvement of a number of subscribers with the new Bank of England - itself created by subscription - indicates that, by printing the names of subscribers, the Dryden-Tonson venture gave its patrons cultural capital in return for their investment. (The presence of the Quaker, Edward Haistwell, ~ondon's largest tobacco trader with Maryland connections, is a reminder of the ImpOrtance of the American colonies to England's growing wealth.) Dryden and Tonson rightly believed that The Works of Virgil brought a divided nation t~gether in its common support of an English cultural achievement, proving that t e growing sense of England's expanding commercial and imperial power was ~atc?ed by English poetry, which had established itself as the equal (or more) of ontmental poetry, and asserted its claims to classic status. Congreve's relationship with Tonson began in the 1690s, and for a while Congreve lodged with his publisher. 14 Both were members of the Kit-Cat Club, whose portraits Tonson commissioned. McKenzie demonstrates conclusively t~at Tonson's publication of Congreve's Works (1710) in three volumes shows t e two men working closely together to ensure that its typography, and the extremely unusual division of acts and scenes in the continental manner, all embody Congreve's aesthetic and expressive intentions. 15 He places this edition as ~art of Tonson's deliberate move towards using smaller formats after 1700. ~hls shift flowed from a purely technical fact - the increase over the years in the SIZe of the sheet, the basic unit of book production: ' ... folios got bigger and a ~uarto.at the end of the century was not much smaller than Jonson's folio had ;,en eighty-odd years before ... in adopting smaller formats, booksellers like onson naturally found it convenient to introduce multi-volume sets [in place of Iarger folios]','6 . McKenzie then lists Tonson's multi-volume publications of this kind, pointlUg Out that Tonson's decisive shift away from the choice of folio for an author's collected works towards smaller formats dates from the middle of the first decade ?f the eighteenth century (as is clear from table I). Cowley's Works were printed 10 folio for the last time in 1700: by 1707 they were published in two octavo ~ol~mes. Even more striking, Shakespeare's Works appeared in 1709 not in folio, r~t IU Rowe's newly edited six-volume octavo edition. Tonson's decision to pub:s? Octavo and duodecimo sets of authors' works in well-printed and responsibly dlt~d texts clearly met, and at the same time defined, a need among readers. The dedication to the multi-volume edition of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays (171 I),

311

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339

ANDREW NASH

important in this context as well. Dolphin Books, developed by Prentice in 1930 , in collusion with Richard Aldington, was a short-lived but nonetheless interesting series of cheap books (Figure 5). Consisting of essays, translations and short stories by important contemporary writers, the original plan was for each text to be issued in three different formats: a signed, limited edition on large paper, a cloth edition and a shilling paperback edition. On the advice of booksellers and travellers, the paperback edition was dropped, and the economic slump forced Chatto & Windus to cut back on the number of titles that appeared in a limited edition. The series was short-lived but produced some distinguished titles, including Samuel Beckett's essay on Proust (1931) - his first commercially published work. The idea of quality literature at a cheap price and the use of a branded image gives a further indication of what was to come in Penguin Books. The story of Penguin has been told elsewhere, but that story is the natural conclusion to this chapter. 36 The cheap price, the paperback binding, the effective use of branding and the innovative marketing techniques all had a massive effect on the direction of British publishing after the war (Figure 6). The first ten Penguins ranged from Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, through Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, to Andre Maurois's life of Shelley, Ariel. In terms of the canon of English Literature Penguin has been equally influential. The Penguin Classics series retains enormous canonical authority among students and teachers of English Literature. And, of course, by and large, it is precisely those highbrow works that Q D. Leavis could not find in the bookshops and libraries of the 1920S that have come to form the canon, even outside academia. By contrast, most of the 'middlebrow' authors discussed above have disappeared; those that have survived have done so largely as a result of specific publishing strategies. Rosamond Lehmann's novels have been reinvigorated by the feminist agenda of the Virago classics, while Richard Hughes's A High Wjnd in Jamajca has come to be marketed as a children's classic. Clear proof, if any were needed, that literary culture and literary canons remain to a considerable extent the product of the material conditions of publishing and reading. NOTES

1

Q D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto

& Windus, 1932), facsimile repr., with an introduction by John Sutherland (London: Pimlico, 2000), p.

xi. F. R. Leavis, Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (Cambridge: The Minority Press, 1930). For a discussion of the intellectual assault on mass culture, see John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses (London: Faber & Faber, 1992). 3 Q D. Leavis, p. 270. 4 Joseph McAleer, Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain, 1914-1950 (Oxford: 2

Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 51. 5 Users of Tuppenny libraries, or Pay-As-You-Read libraries, paid for books as they borrowed them. There was thus a financial incentive for such libraries to stock shorter books because they would be borrowed and returned more quickly. Subscription

340

Literary culture and literary publishing in inter-war Britain libraries, in contrast, favoured longer books because it meant that fewer titles needed to be stocked to satisfy the demands of borrowers who had made an annual payment up front. 6 John Attenborough, Hodder and Stoughton, Publishers: 1868-1975 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975), p. 103. 7 Q D. Leavis, p. 6. 8 Q D. Leavis, p. 5. 9 For discussion of the material context of modernism, see Modernist Writers and the Marketplace, ed. by Ian Willison, Warwick Gould and Warren Chernaik (Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan, 1996); and Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998). 10 Q D. Leavis, p. 263. 1I Maureen Duffy, A Thousand Capricious Chances: A History ofthe Methuen List, 188g1989 (London: Methuen, 1989), p. 76. 12 The Book World, ed. by Henry Scheurmier (London: Thomas Nelson, 1935), p. 196. 13 McAleer, p. 49; The Book World, p. 201. 14 Q D. Leavis, pp. 19-20 . IS Titles to Fame, ed. by Denys Kilham Roberts (London: Thomas Nelson 1937), p. xv. 16 Harold Raymond to Rosamond Lehmann, 6 May 1932 (Chatto & Windus Archive, Reading University Library, hereafter abbreviated to RUL). 17 Q D. Leavis, p. 6. 18 John St John, William Heinemann: A Century of Publishing 1890-1990 (London: Heinemann, 1990), p. 231. 19 E. W. Heffer to Chatto & Windus, 25 April 1931 (RUL). 20 Boots' Booklover's Library to Chatto & Wind us, 22 May 1931 (RUL). 21 See Adam Parkes, Modernism and the Theater of Censorship (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 22 See J. H. Willis Jr, 'The Censored Language of War: Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero and three other War novels of 1929', Twentieth-Century Literature, 45:4 (1999), 467-87. 23 Harold Raymond to H. W. Freeman, 12July 1935; 21 October 1935 (RUL). 24 Raymond to Freeman, 3 January 1933 (RUL). 25 Raymond to Freeman, 12 July 1935 (RUL). 26 Sunday Times, 22 March 19 27. 27 Janice Radway, A Feelingfor Books: The Book-oJ-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 28 Harold Raymond to Henry Holt, 26 July 1927 (RUL). 29 Q D. Leavis, pp. 22-4. 30 Quoted in Q D. Leavis, p. 23. 31 Megan L. Benton, Beauty and the Book: Fine Editions and Cultural Distinction in America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 3. 32 The Book World, pp. 153-4. 33 St John, p. 180. 34 For background on Prentice and an extended discussion of his crucial role in the career of T. F. Powys, see Andrew Nash and James Knowlson, 'Charles Prentice and T. F. Powys: a publisher's influence', PowysJournal, XII (2002),35-66.

34 1

ANDREW NASH

35 Peter L. Caracciolo, 'The Metamorphoses of Wyndham Lewis's The Human Age: Medium, Intertextuality, Genre', in Modernist Writers and the Marketplace (note 9 above), pp. 258-86. 36 See Penguin Portrait: Allen Lane and the Penguin Editors, 1935-1970, ed. by Steve Hare (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995); Nicholas Joicey, 'A Paperback Guide to Progress: Penguin Books, 1935-c.1951', Twentieth-Century British History, 4: 1 (1993), 25-5 6.

342

'THE ELIXIR OF LIFE' Richard Garnett, the British Museum Library and literary London RICHARD LANDON

WHEN SIR SIDNEY LEE, the editor of the Dictionary oJNationalBiography, came to write the obituary article on Richard Garnett, one of his most stalwart COntributors, he designated him as a 'man of letters and keeper of printed books a~ the British Museum'. This encapsulation of a career was probably close to the VIew of the man himself for, in addition to his 196 DNB articles, he produced b~oks of poetry, biography, literary history and criticism, and essays, together ":Ith much editorial work. To the British Museum, which he served for fortyeIght years, he contributed an acquisitions policy modelled on the foundation of his hero, Sir Anthony Panizzi, the compilation of the printed catalogue of books, the sliding press, and the introduction of photography for reproductive Purposes. To many of his contemporaries in the literary community, however, he ~as t?e embodiment of a living encyclopaedia whose vast knowledge of classical, enalssance, and modern literature and history, together with an astonishing memory, was made freely available to anyone who wished to consult him. He was a professor in Panizzi's 'university of the people', although that designation is ~erhaps ironic in that Garnett seems to have refused the opportunity to prepare or matriculation at either Oxford or Cambridge, and entered the British ~useum at the age of sixteen after the death of his father, an Assistant Keeper; IS appointment due to the patronage of Panizzi. Richard Garnett was born in Lichfield in 1835 but moved to London with his family in 1838. His education was primarily at home, with two short periods at Schools, and his father encouraged him to acquire classical and European languages and to read widely. He thus began his career at the British Museum as a proficient cataloguer, but soon became a 'Placer of Books' which meant that he Was required to classify books according to their content into a shelving system ~f m~re than seven hundred divisions and sub-divisions. This necessitated ~ndhng and reading, at least in part, thousands of books, new and old, in many dIfferent languages, and the information thus gained and tenaciously remem~ered was to last the rest of his life and create his formidable reputation. In 1875 e became an Assistant Keeper and Superintendent of the Reading Room until 1884, when he resigned that post to work full-time on the editing of the Catalogue. In 1890 he was promoted to Keeper of Printed Books and he retired from that position in 1899, one year early, in order to move his ailing wife to the 343

RICHARD LANDON

more salubrious atmosphere of Hampstead. His honorary doctorate was conferred on him by the University of Edinburgh in 1883 and he was made C.B. in 1895. In retirement Garnett continued to write and edit, and answer questions, many of them by post. He died on 13 April 1906 and was interred in Highgate Cemetery. Richard Garnett's literary career began in 1859 with the publication of his first book of poetry, Primula, A Book of Lyrics, which was issued anonymously. The following year many of the poems were published again as part of 10 in Egypt, and Other Poems with his name on the title-page. Included for the first time were some translations from Goethe, Brentano, Mickiewicz, Bocage and Petofi, which presaged an important aspect of his literary life. Also in 1859, he edited The Philological Essays of his father for which he wrote a brief memoir, revealing something of the source of his own linguistic attainments. Poems From the German followed in 1862, as did his most controversial book, Relics of Shelley, produced at the request of Sir Percy Shelley and his wife, Jane. Garnett had long been a devoted reader of Shelley and included a poem, 'To the Memory of Shelley', in 10 in Egypt, a copy of which he sent to the Shelleys. Lines such as 'With sudden tremor of a heart that bleeds / Some pale requital for thy price-less drops' struck a chord, especially with Lady Shelley who revered the memory of the poet and had, literally, erected a shrine to him and Mary Shelley at Boscombe, their house near Bournemouth. An invitation to meet and to visit Boscombe was forthcoming and Garnett became, perhaps unwittingly, part of Lady Shelley's not very subtle campaign to rehabilitate the personal reputations of the poet and his second wife. This involved the denigration of the character of Harriet Shelley, the wronged woman, who was being defended by Thomas Love Peacock in a series of magazine articles. Thus the 'relics' were chosen with care to reflect this view, as had been the extracts included in Lady Shelley's Shelley Memorials in 1859. There is some evidence that Garnett was called in to ghost-write the critical notes in the Memorials, but the timing is wrong and he does not seem to have had a copy until sent one by Lady Shelley in 1859. What he certainly did do, in the June 1860 issue of Macmillan's Magazine, was write an article called 'Shelley in Pall Mall' in which he attacked Peacock and stated that documents in the possession of the Shelley family would refute his arguments concerning Harriet. Unfortunately, no such documents ever appeared, except for a few forgeries, and Peacock, as an executor of the poet and a friend of Harriet, could write with some conviction in Fraser's Magazine of I January 1860: 'The separation did not take place by mutual consent. I cannot think that Shelley ever so represented it. He never did so to me.)! Garnett compounded his error in the Relics by including an essay of his own, called 'Shelley, Harriet Shelley, and Mr. T. L. Peacock'. In it sentences like 'It is not my wish to bear hardly upon Mr. Peacock, but I cannot, in justice to my case, refrain from adverting to a very marked instance of sophistry on his part' were calculated to provoke a reaction from Peacock (who died in 1866) and his many friends and supporters, and so it proved. Typical was the remark of the reviewer (probably Richard 344

'The Elixir of Life' Hutton) in the Spectator: 'Except a beautiful poem of Shelley's which was published a few months ago in Macmillan's Magazine, and one of some merit ~f Mr. Garnett's own, on the poet ... there is nothing in this book that has any hterary unity or finish." Later in his life Garnett did retract his attack on Peacock as unjust, edited a ten-volume edition of his works in 1891, and wrote an affectionate and perceptive life of him for the DNB. His remark in a letter to his brother in March 1862 was prophetic: 'The only rules that can be laid down in Shelley'S affairs are that everything happens that nobody would have expected, and that everybody concerned gets into more or less of a scrape.'3 Despite the reputation of his book, Garnett was viewed and consulted as an authority on Shelley, and was wooed by the Shelley Society through F. J. Furnivall and T. J. Wise - although he doesn't seem to have joined it, Garnett chaired a few meetings and wrote one paper for it. However, he went to his grave believing firmly in 'the Shelley Legend'. Garnett's Idylls and Epigrams, Chiefly from the Greek Anthology was published by Macmillan in 1869, but most of his energy from the early 1860s until the 1890s, apart from continuing journalism, was taken up with his increasing responsibilities at the British Museum, especially after he became Superinte~dent of the Reading Room and embarked on the compilation of the great Prtnted catalogue. The exception was the book he is best remembered for, The Twilight ofthe Gods of 1888. A collection of stories based to a considerable extent on the esoteric lore that he frequently discovered in the books he handled on a daily basis, and told from a pagan point of view, it is gently satirical, very amUsing, and very un-Victorian. Although published by T. Fisher Unwin ~nd well reviewed by the major journals, it sold slowly and, according to A. W. ollard, was saved from the remainder table in 1891 only by the action of ~arnett's Museum colleagues buying up twenty-five copies. 4 A second edition ~om John Lane appeared in 1903, adding twelve new stories to the original Sixteen, and it has been re-issued many times in the twentieth century. It is nl.o w considered a minor classic and has a unique place in the history of English lterature. C During the late 1880s and through the 1890S Garnett wrote short lives of arlyle, Emerson, Milton, Blake and Edward Gibbon Wakefield. He also edited ~~~ks by Coventry Patmore, Shelley, Thomas Garnett (his grandfather), De ,,for7I1m1td grwmJ.

AIIIi.1'I, I think, Francesca Orsini's remarks at the conference on language took questions of multi-lingualism somewhat further, in her reminder of the distinctions in nineteenth-century northern India between use of vernaculars and different genres. By introducing the concept of multiple centres, different places and different kinds of places, she posed not just questions concerning the place of print (in this case often lithography), but also a more general enquiry concerning the importance of location and meaning. Here, again, are topics for further application, concerning status and the tendency in some societies for translation into dominant languages (Sheldon Pollock instanced English, but he might have added others) to lead to standardization. To raise the name of Jeans is also to raise the phenomenon of broadcasting, since he enjoyed a radio career that both enhanced and was supported by his career as lecturer and author of the printed word. If it is obvious that the history of broadcasting has a natural relationship to the history of the book - both as a complement to printing and as an alternative to it, as a promoter and as a distraction - then it is also obvious that the development of radio and television from nation-based activities to matters for international trade and world communication has its own effect on any structure of the history of the book as it might be developed beyond its present overwhelmingly national boundaries. It is Mollier who enunciates this nexus most explicitly: that for much of the last hundred years writers have been admitted to the Panthion, formal or otherwise, not just by the printed word, but also by the media of cinema, radio and recorded sound. To repeat: a single book can hope to achieve only so much. Looking to the future, and looking also, again, at lacunae, one obvious language has been neglected as an international phenomenon: the use of Latin. Neo-Latin poetry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the use of Latin as a means of international communication not just in the humanities but also, and no less critically, in the sciences; the survival of it in use both in literature and as a means of international communication long after it had been displaced for most purposes by the new linguae francae French and English: all suggest opportunities for international perspectives on the history of the book and of international communication. 33 The development of international preferences for languages suggests fruitful possibilities in the history of the book. Quite apart from the general use of French in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Republique des lettres, the continuing use of French in diplomatic circles, and the early use of English in

420

Perspectives for an international history of the book trade, before it began its progress towards a world language in the first half of the nineteenth century, both demand further investigation. Migrations and diasporas also have parts to play. In non-western contexts, the defining importance of Arabic and its relationship to smaller languages, or the multi-lingual and multi-script environments either of the world for which the tri-lingual Rosetta stone was prepared 34 or of the Indian sub-continent, or the divergences and convergences of Chinese, all offer examples of backgrounds against which written and printed communication must be studied and evaluated. Beside all this lies the role of illustration: its meaning, use, status and ability to transcend language. Robert Hillenbrand remarked only half-playfully on the absence other than himself among the speakers of full-time art historians. Isabel Hofmeyr discussed the illustration of Bunyan in nineteenth-century Africa. But We seemed for a moment to be coming closest to themes of text and image in Fran~ois Vallotton's allusion to the Belgian passion for bandes dessinees. If we look at other aspects of the history of book illustration, perhaps especially but certainly not exclusively in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, we find divergences that are not yet widely understood: in questions of personnel, in questions of manufacture, in questions of sale, in questions of reading. More explicitly of international interest, questions of illustration include issues of shared international production, not just of shared international publishing. Whether in the international collaboration in illuminated manuscripts in the late fifteenth century, the import of Dutch-printed engravings for British books in the seventeenth, German colour-printing for foreign markets in the nineteenth, or the use of cheap colour printing in Hungary and Czechoslovakia for editions in multiple western language markets in the twentieth, there is a wealth of questions to be enquired after. In other words, here, again, is an opportunity for future mustering and evaluation. ' A further entrance to questions of more general history is through themes related to music. Francesca Orsini alluded to Indian raga; Michael Winship mentioned music in connection with Uncle Tom's Cabin; and Brian Richardson referred to literature as being sung as well as written, spoken or printed. Whether We think of Burns and the Scottish popular song tradition to which Beethoven showed himself so attracted in the arrangements he published through George Thomson from about 1809 onwards,3s or of the hundreds of song settings of Tennyson or Longfellow,3 6 or of Schubert and Lieder based on Ossian and other non-Germans, or the inspiration found in the libretti of Pietro Metastasio by Handel, Hasse and many others, international perspectives keep intruding themselves. Metastasio's Alessandro nell'Indie, set to music sometimes under different titles by composers including Hasse, Handel, Scarlatti, Gluck, Jommelli, J. c. Bach, Cimarosa and Cherubini, and first performed in a setting by Leonardo Vinci at Rome in 1729, had by 1760 been staged in London, Vienna, Dresden, St Petersburg, Stuttgart and Mannheim, quite apart from the major Italian centres. 37 In its mingling of words and notes, quite apart from performance traditions and practices, the musical world, dependent on manuscript or printed 421

DAVID McKITTERICK

scores, is almost by definition a lively embodiment of the principle that it is awkwardly restrictive to think in national terms of the history of the book. Indeed, where exactly can we say that books are published? In a sense, music can be said to be published by performance. Mendelssohn's Elijah was first performed at Birmingham in 1846, and the first printed score was not issued until 1847, in Bonn. In non-musical literature, false imprints abound, not just in the celebrated examples of the eighteenth-century French market, where 'Londres' was added misleadingly to title-pages, where the Low Countries were active in supplying an illicit trade, and where books were also smuggled over the border from Switzerland. The early editions of Voltaire's Candide have their own complicated story.38 Some of these were old tricks. The enormous trade in English bibles in the seventeenth century was conducted largely from Amsterdam, printers using false place-names, false names of printers and false dates in order not just to circumvent the monopolies of the British trade, but also to ensure a continuing supply of the Geneva text of the Bible for many years after the imposition of the King James, or Authorized, Version in 1611. 39 In our own time, the pirate activities of book printers in India, Taiwan, Korea and elsewhere all have their effect on publishing, bookselling and reading, though the literature on them is understandably meagre once one moves away from that stimulated by the affronted trade principally in Britain and the United States of America. This has brought us back to questions of manufacture, of type, of paper, of format. How far can the material qualities of books take us in our subject of internationalism? In writing of an Age du papier, Mollier stresses the fundamental issue: that books are judged by their manufacture as well as by their content, and that the two are inseparable. His allusion to the importance of the newspaper industry, and to the beginnings of the modern paperback, emphasizes his point. It is a timely one, for historians of the book have barely started to analyse these at a serious level. Is sehizophrenie intelleetuelle, the ability of authors and reading publics to exist simultaneously in environments of high and low culture, conventional book publishing and the so-called popular media of newsprint and the film screen, solely a French phenomenon? Surely not. This question has the potential for fruitful enquiry elsewhere, and perhaps more general application. The history of the book is in some measure the history of presentation. Both Andrew Nash in his chapter on Chatto & Windus and Sydney Shep in hers on J. C. Beaglehole discusses questions of typography, Nash also reminding us of the importance of uniformity in packaging as a means both of economies and of market control. 40 The divergence within the British and American book trades during the later 1920S, on the one hand seeking out standard pricing and standard products, and on the other exploiting customers' desires to acquire books that were distinctive, was dealt a blow with the stock-market crash in 1929 from which the general trade in luxury editions never recovered. The values of the private press, brought to marketing even quite ordinary first editions of current novelists, and sometimes providing no more than a veneer of distinction, proved to have little staying power in that form. They re-emerged about forty years later 422

Perspectives for an international history of the book in a no less cynical manipulation of the buying public with mass-market so-called collectors' editions, where the sales patter similarly appealed to the superior (or sUpposedly superior) qualities of the materials used for their making. Similar developments are to be found in some other parts of the world, but there is an important general point: the materials of books, and their visual, even tactile, presentation have a direct bearing on markets, on purpose and on reading. Working within the nineteenth century, Michael Winship on Uncle Tom's Cabin alludes to bindings; the same topic is touched on by Jean-Franr;:ois Botrel in connection with the publication of Zola and, this time with the bespoke trade, by Maria Luisa Lopez-Vidriero, in connection with Mexico. The conference did not hear much about paper, but a reminder of the short life and rapid physical deterioration of many of the text supports used in south Asia was apt in its relationship to the chronological pacing of copying, and the central importance of re-copying. The activities of scribes in western Europe in the eighth and ninth centuries, copying out classical authors and so ensuring their survival, offer a parallel from another tradition in which, for at least some kinds of works, both text and layout were preservedY The need for book historians to be sensitive to material qualities, and not just to quantities, should be obvious enough. In all of this there arise questions not just of comparisons, but also of competition. The printing, publishing and bookselling trades are all defined by competition: in materials, in skill in manufacture, in discounts, in commercial rents, in footfalls outside shops, in prices. Competition in printing, publishing and bookselling results in survival or failure. Questions of appropriate materials, and their relationships to proposed markets, were inherited by the early printers from the manuscript trade, and the preoccupations of carto/ai were continued into their bookselling and book publishing successors. Questions of competition between authors have been a part of the book trade for centuries, arguably since the beginning of large-scale publishing of new work by living rather than dead authors. But they have been enunciated, increasing to the point of cacophany, by foundations and, increasingly, the book trade itself, in the last century and more, with competitions of which the Prix Goncourt in France, the Pulitzer prizes in America and the Booker prizes in Britain offer only the most obvious examples. 4' In a strong sense, books themselves are defined by competition, local, national or international. Here, again, is a route worth exploration towards our international goal. Thus, if no single thesis emerged from this book, it does help to make clearer several themes that deserve to be examined further. In particular, the decision to attempt to cover an exceptionally long period, and to be global in scope, inevitably leads to contrasts. The emphasis in India on spoken and sung traditions, the long manuscript tradition in Japan, the decline of printing in China after the tenth century, the short time-span of the manufacture of movable-type editions of the abbreviated Tale of Genji in the 1640S and its displacement by wood-block editions, the differing relative status attached to writing and to print at different times and in different places, all challenge

DAVID MCKITTERICK

assumptions to which the west has been accustomed. 43 The notion that the advent of printing, whether in fifteenth-century Europe or in tenth-century Egypt# or in ninth-century China, leads to its adoption almost because its benefits seem self-evident, always requires to be cross-examined. Many people in the Catholic church in western Europe were suspicious of its potential for theological or even social anarchy. Reasons for its interrupted history in parts of east Asia were at once very different and (as in the case of the Tale of Genii) not so very different: concern was with readers and reading, and not necessarily with technical issues. The resistance to print in southern India and in many parts of the Islamic world was likewise not one for which technical issues were entirely to blame. In a book designed to examine the relationships between the history of the book and literary cultures, there are many lessons on which to reflect, both general and particular. I conclude with a theme that emerges in different ways, and that has a general application. It may be summed up in the word 'expectations'. I have already alluded to one aspect of this, in the counter-experiences to be found by comparing books in different societies, and the assumptions that this book was designed, in part, to question. More particularly, and within his own chosen topic, Brian Richardson draws attention to questions of expectation in his remarks on the Aldine octavos, and their relation to the manuscript tradition. In proceeding to discuss questions of social organization, the social use of print by Bembo and the campaign for a canon of Italian literature, he was continuing with a further aspect of the same theme. It emerges, in another form, in John Barnard's discussion of English literary canons. His account exemplifies the link between canons and literary communities by examining the place of anthologies. We speak here not only of communities of authors, but also of communities in the book trade (the circle of Jacob Tonson at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries forms an obvious British example), and of canons of commerce. Like literary and other social communities, the anthology carries with it a burden of expectation that has always to be balanced against possible innovation. At its simplest, the availability of particular copyright or non-copyright texts helps shape content, and hence context and popular memory.45 In other words, we again witness tensions in expectancy, this time amid the coercions and possibilities of the market-place. We may reflect further. If reading is an intensely conservative skill - literally in that it is part of the process that conserves past knowledge, mentally in that it depends on what is already known, and physiologically in that legibility depends very largely on response to what is typographically familiar - it also carries with it its own expectations. The degree to which authors, agents, printers, bookbinders, publishers, reviewing journals, advertising, libraries or bookshops challenge these or other expectations presents yet another way of contemplating the history of the book in terms that look beyond national boundaries.

Perspectives for an international history of the book NOTES I

2

3

4

5

6

7 8

9

For another recent view, focusing on English writing during the I 590s, see Georgia Brown, Redefining Elizabethan Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2°°4)· 'Such are the literature of science and philosophy, and that of politics and economics; parliamentary eloquence; the work of schools and universities and libraries; scholarship; the pamphlet literature of religious and political controversy; the newspaper and the magazine; the labours of the press and the services of booksellers; homely books dealing with precept and manners and social life; domestic letters and street songs; accounts of travel and records of sport' (A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller, The Cambridge History of English Literature I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907), preface, p. vii). Note the distinction made by another member of the English Faculty in recalling the impact of Willey's course: 'It was a relief to them [i.e. undergraduate students] to turn from pure literature to writers who, though men of letters also, were primarily thinkers.' E. M. W. Tillyard, The Muse Unchained; an Intimate Account of the Revolution in English Studies at Cambridge (London: Bowes & Bowes, 1958), p. 118. 'Une maison est une machine-a-habiter.' (Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture [Paris, 1923]). This was not translated into English, as Towards a New Architecture, until 192 7. See for example Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body; a Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). For earlier literary standpoints, see for example Gillian Beer, Open Fields: Scient'( in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 'There is a brilliant little book on mathematics in the Home University Library, that in my Cambridge days we used to know as "Whitehead's shilling shocker".' W. W. Greg, 'The present position of bibliography', The Library 10 (1930), 241-62, repro in his Collected Papers, ed. by J. C. Maxwell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), pp. 207-25, at p. 214. T. S. Eliot, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, ed. by Ronald Schuchard (London: Faber & Faber, 1993). Michael Hunter, The Royal Sot'iety and its Fellows, 1660-1700; the Morphology of an Early Scientific Institution (Chalfont St Giles: British Society for the History of Science, 1982). Similar cross-fertilization is to be seen, for example, in the Journal des Sfavans, founded in 1665 and dedicated to 'ce qui se passe de nouveau dans la Repuhlique des Lettres' Uean Sgard, Dictionnaire des journaux, 1600-1789, 2 vols (Paris: Universitas, 1991),2, p. 710). Some of the early tensions in the Royal Society are reflected in the title not authorized in its foundation charter of 1662 (which spoke only of the Regalis Societas) but quickly adopted in the oath required of each new Fellow, who swore to promote the good of the 'Royal Society of London for improving natural knowledge'. See The Record of the Royal Society of London for the Promo/ion ofNatural Knowledge, 4th edn (London: Royal Society, 1940), pp. 215, 287. R. F. Sharp, Catalogue of a Collection of Early Printed Books in the Library ofthe Royal Society (1910); sale at Sotheby's 4 May 1925; P. R. Harris, A History of the British Museum Library, 1753-1973 (London: The British Library, 1998), pp. 70, 73. Printed books sold in the late nineteenth century were offered in the catalogues of Messrs Quaritch.

DAVID McKITTERICK

10 See for example the remarks on the relevance of some of the sciences in Henri-Jean Martin, Les metamorphoses du livre (Paris: A. Michel, 2004), pp. 216, 242, 256-7. I I Just one example might be quoted. Daniel R.Woolf's The Idea of History in Early Stuart England: Erudition, Ideology and 'the Light of Truth 'from the Accession ofJames I to the Civil War (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1990) was remarkable for its determined insistence on concentrating on those whom we now choose to term historians - a very different concept from studying (as the title of the book suggested would be the case) history as it was viewed and understood in the seventeenth century. Notwithstanding the difference in the periods concerned, this restrictive approach will bear some comparison with the concept of the idea of history exemplified in Colette Beaune, Naissance de la nation France (Paris: Gallimard, 1985) and with many of the essays in Les lieux de memo ire, ed. by Pierre Nora, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1997)· 12 C( Peter Burke, Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). See also his remarks on Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1983, revised edn, London: Verso, 1991), at pp. 6,166-9. 13 For this large subject, in which theory and practice can be very different, see for example Helmut Zedelmaier, Bibliotheca universalis und bibliotheca setecta; das Problem der Ordnung des gelehrten Wissens in der fruhen Neuzeit (Koln: Bohlau, 1992); Archer Taylor, General Subject-Indexes since 1548 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1966); Archer Taylor, Book Catalogues, their Varieties and Uses, 2nd edn, revised by William P. Barlow, Jr (Winchester: St Paul's Bibliographies, 1986). For a wider view, see for example History and the Disciplines; the Reclassification of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Donald R. Kelley (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1997). 14 (Petrus Bertius) Nomenclator autorum omnium quorum Iibri ... exstant in bibliotheca Academiae Lugduno-Batavae (Lugduni Batavorum, 1595). For the history of the library, see now Christiane Berkvens-Stevelinck, Geschiedenis van de Leidse Universiteitsbibliotheek, 1575-2000 (Lei den: Primavera, 2001). 15 Alfredo Serrai, La bib/ioteca di Lucas Holstenius (Udine: Forum, 2000). 16 Les mutations du livre et de [,edition dans Ie monde du xviiie siecle d I'an 2000, ed. by Jacques Michon and Jean-Yves Mollier (Saint-Nicolas (Q!Iebec) and Paris: Presses de l'Universite Laval and L'Harmattan, 2001). 17 Florence, forthcoming. 18 Nancy G. Siraisi, Avicenna in Renaissance Italy: the Canon and Medical Teaching in Italian Universities after 1500 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). 19 The words are those of Colin Matthew, founding editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), introduction, p. viii. 20 Some of the changes to the modern Arab world, including social, political and religious changes to Islam, and the consequences for the history of the book, form the background to George N. Atiyeh, 'The book in the modern Arab world: the cases of Lebanon and Egypt', in The Book in the Islamic World; the Written Word and Communication in the Middle East, ed. by George N. Atiyeh, (Albany: Suny Press, 1995), pp. 233-53· 21 But for a deliberately contextual (rather than comparative) approach, see Peter Kornicki, The Book in Japan; a Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1998). 22 In a large literature on this subject, see for example Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning:

Perspectives for an international history of the book

23

24

25

26 27

28

29

30

3I 32

Conduct and Community in the Republic oj Letters, 168o-1750 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Commercium litterarium, 1600-1750: la communication dans la Republique des lettres: conflrences des colloques tenus d Paris 1992 et d Nimegue 1993, ed. by Hans Bots and Franc;:oise Waquet (Amsterdam: APA-Holland University Press, 1994)· This was exemplified in the public row following the British Library's decision to discard most of its post-J850 non-British and non-British Empire newspapers, in the belief that microfilm was an adequate surrogate: see Do We Want to Keep our Newspapers?, ed. by David McKitterick (London: Office for Humanities Communications, 2002) and Nicholson Baker, Double Fold; Libraries and the Assault on Paper (New York: Random House, 2001): the action provoked considerable debate. Not dissimilar restrictions in ways of thinking, of priorities in perceived responsibilities and of the use of public funds without full regard for the implications for some public needs, may be discovered in proposals put forward under the aegis of the National Library of Australia in the mid-1990S for repatriation to their individual states of historic runs of newspapers held in Australian libraries. Some cognate questions concerning universality of collecting, in the specific context of copyright deposit, were raised in Brian Enright and others, Selection for Survival: a Review ojAcquisition and Retention Policies (London: The British Library, 1989); see also the provocative remarks by D. F. McKenzie, 'Our textual definition of the future: the new English imperialism', in his Making Meaning: 'Printers ojthe Mind' and other Essays, ed. by Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), pp. 276-81. Mark Rose, Authors and Owners; the Invention oj Copyright (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993); Ronan Deazley, On the Ongin oJthe Right to Copy; Charting the Movement oJCopynght Law in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1695-1775) (Oxford: Hart, 2004); Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe, Copyright in the Renaissance; Prints and the Privilegio in Sixteenth-Century Venice and Rome (Lei den: Brill, 2004). Elizabeth Armstrong, Before Copyright; the French Book-Privilege System, 1498-1526 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 209. See for example William Charvat, Literary Publishing in America, 1790-1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959); Michael Winship, American Literary Publishing in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: the Business oj Ticknor and Fields (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Franc;:ois Godfroid, Aspects inconnus et meconnus de la contreJafon en Belgique (Bruxelles, 1998); William B. Todd and Ann Bowden, Tauchnitz International Editions in English, 1841-1955: a Bibliographical History (New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1988). For one recent account of one tradition, see William M. Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a Book: the Textualization oj Ancient Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); see also W. Graham, Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects ojScripture in the History ojReligion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). For a recent example, see Eugenia Roldan Vera, The British Book Trade and Spanish American Independence: Education and Knowledge Transmission in Transcontinental Perspective (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). Bernhard Fabian, The English Book in EIghteenth-Century Germany (London: The British Library, 1992). The standard biography of Jeans is E. A. Milne, Sir James Jeans; a Biography

DAVID McKITTERICK

33

34

35

36

37 38 39

40

41 4Z

43

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 195z). For his publications, see for example David McKitterick, A History of Cambridge University Press. 3. New Worlds for Learning, 1873-1972 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Z004), pp. z64-5, Z9Z-3 etc. Franr,:oise Waquet, Latin, or the Empire of a Sign: from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries, transJ. John Howe (London: Verso, ZOOI); Burke, Languages and Communities, pp. 43-60, is mostly concerned with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For something of the bibliographical background, see Jozef Ijsewijn, Companion to neo-Latin Studies, znd edn, Z vols (Leuven: Peeters, 1990-8). Richard Parkinson et aI., Cracking Codes: the Rosetta Stone and Decipherment (London: British Museum Press, 1999) offers a range of related material, in a book prepared for an exhibition to mark the bicentenary of the stone's discovery. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. by Stanley Sadie, zo vols (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980), z, pp. 409-10. See for example Bryan N. S. Gooch and David S. Thatcher, Musical Settings of late Victorian and Modern British Literature: a Catalogue (New York: Garland, 1976). New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, art. 'Metastasio, Pietro'. See the notes by Giles Barber in Voltaire, Candide ou I'optimisme, ed. by Rene Pomeau, Complete Works of Voltaire 48 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1980), pp. 86-110. A. S. Herbert, Historical Catalogue of Printed Editions of the English Bible, 1525-1961 (London: British and Foreign Bible Society, 1968); Kees Gnirrep, 'Standing type or stereotype in the seventeenth century', Quaerendo z7 (1997),19-45. This question is further explored in the Sandars lectures of John Dreyfus, British Book Typography, 1889-1939, delivered at Cambridge in 1980: the three lectures remain unpublished, but typescript copies are in Cambridge University Library (shelfmark 864.a.36) and in the British Library (shelfmark Ac:z660.m.(30)). Rosamond McKitterick, History and Memory in the Carolingian World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Z004), pp. ZOZ-4. Bessy Graham, Literary and Library Prizes, 8th edn, revised and ed. by Jeanne J. Henderson and Brenda G. Piggins (New York: R. R. Bowker & Co., 1973). For a recent attempt to view matters other than inexorably from the west, see Encounters; the Meeting ofAsia and Europe, 1500-1800, ed. by Anna Jackson and Amin Jaffer (London: V&A Publications, Z004), published to accompany an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The assimilation of European ideas into Japanese cartography during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is discussed by Kazutaka Unno, 'Cartography in Japan', in Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies (History of Cartography, Z part z), ed. by J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 346-455, at pp. 376-94; for the contrast in China, where 'cartographic practice shows few traces of European influence' between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Cordell D. K. Yee, 'Traditional Chinese Cartography and the Myth of Westernization', ibid., pp. 170zoz.

44 For printed amulets produced between the tenth and fifteenth centuries, see for example Karl Schaefer, 'Arabic Printing before Gutenberg - Block-Printed Arabic Amulets', in Middle Eastern Languages and the Print Revolution; a Cross-Cultural Encounter, ed. by Eva Hanebutt-Benz et al. (Mainz: Gutenberg Museum, zooz), pp. 123-8. See also (with further references) Karl R. Schaefer, 'Eleven Medieval Arabic Block Prints in the Cambridge University Library', Arabica 48 (ZOOI), ZI0-39.

Perspectives for an international history of the book A further group has since been found in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. 45 For a detailed account of the influence of copyright and its relation to publishing, manufacture and popular reading, see now William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

INDEX

Abelard 168 Abu Sa'id, Mongol ruler of Iran 107 112 Abraham, P. & R. Desne

Manuels d'histoire liueraire de la France 291 Abu Sa'id 105 107 112 Achaeminid empire 7999-100 102 104 Achebe, C. 127281 Acton, Lord 352 Addison,]. 310318 Aelfric Grammatica 85 Aelfric Bata 148-50 Akkadian 33 album 198-9 Alexander the Great 103-4107 111-12 Alfred the Great 9 83 85 Africa 9 121-32 passim African Publishers' Network 29 1 Afrilivres 291 Ahmad Qmi'i, Turkish poet 101-2 Aiken, GL. 369 al-Hakam II, Caliph 95 al-Mughira 98 Alan of Farfa 153 Alaoui, S. 234 Alas, L. 19232-3234236 La Regenta 235 Albania 256 Albanian (language) 256-7 Alcala de Henares 210212n Alcuin 150-1 153 Aldenhoven, F. (bookseller) 262 Aldington, R. 328-31 334 340 Dath o/a Hero 328329-31 The Colonel's Daughter 327-8 33 1 Aldus Manutius 14-15 1622 24176-83 184 188n Alexander the Great 995

103-13140 Alexander, P. 358 Alexandria 5 I I 13 1421 25 140141 17 In Algiers 284 Allen, G (publisher) 361

Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek 247-5 0 almanacs 16-17 191 193-203 204n 205n 207 25 8 357 Almanach des Muses 194 Musen Almanch 258 Northern Flowers 196 Podarok bednym 196 Poliarnaia zvezda 194-6 198 Severnaia lira 196 Tsarskoe selo 196 Urania 196 Venok gratsii 198 Amadis o/Gaul 209 Amalarius 153 Amiel, H.-F. Journal intime 289 Amory, H. 377 Amsterdam 283 Amukta-malyada 82 Anderson, B. 77 Angus & Robertson (publishers) 405 408 409 Anquetil, L.-P. Histoire de France 272 anthology, anthologies 5 7 20 3747-5058-60271 282-3 288 309 Apabhramsha language and literature 81 85 Apollonius of Rhodes Argonautica 168 Arabic Ian gauge and literature 9598- 102 Arac,]. 376 Aragon, L. 271 276 Aramaic script 79 arankerram 92n Ariosto, L. Orlando Furioso 177

43 1

Aristophanes 40 Aristotle 134 142n 143n Arktinos of Miletos 136 Armah, A.K. 127 Armstrong, L. 188n Arras 147 Arte y Letras (publisher) 235 Arthaud (publisher) 292 Arthur Press (publisher) 337 Ascham, R. 71 Ashburnham sale 346 Ashurbanipal 1334 Assn of Saint Ermagoras 263 Asoka, Mauryan emperor 79 Association of Saint Ermagoras 26 3 Atar (publisher) 286 288 Athens 259 262 Attinger (publisher) 286 288 Augustine, St 13 153 160 161 164168

City o/God ISO Confessions 160 163 De Doctrina Christiana 153 De Genesi ad Liueram 153 De vera religione 160 Enarrationes in Psa/mos 163 Austen,]. 43 Australia 399-412 passim 417 418 Autpertus, Ambrosius 151 Avadanaka/pa/ata 87 Averroes 417 Avicenna 417 Avranches I So Azevedo, A. o Mulato 233 236 Bacchylides 38 Bahram Gur 109-11 Balsamo, L. 178 Balzac, H. de 270271 272275 28 5 Barber, K. 126 127 Barbier, F. 19303-5 Barbusse, H. 271

Index Barlow,J.

The Columbiad 367 Barnard, J. 17-25 passim 424 Barnes, J. 24 25417 Bate, J. 413 414 Baudelaire, C. 271277285349 Baumgarten, A. 245 Bayl~C.A. 128-9 Baynton, B. 25 400 406

Busk Studies 406 Human Toll 406 Beach, S. 271 Beaglehole, J.c. 24387-96 397 n

Verses for my Father 392 Beaulieu, V.-L. 300-1 303 Beaumont, F. & J. Fletcher Works 311 314316317 Beaumont, J.-M. de

Le Magasin des Enfants 261 Beckett, S. 337

Proust 340 Beckford, W. 345 Bede 153 154 Belgium 419 Belinsky, V. 199-200 Bell, C. 325 335 Bell,J. (publisher) 43316 Bell, M.D. 375 376 Belot, A. 232 Bembo, B. 183 Bembo, P. 14-25 passim 178 179-86 188n 189n 424 Asolani 180183 184

De aetna 180 Rime 185 Benedict, St 150 151 154 Rule of St Benedict 151 Bengali (Bangia) language and literature 82 86 88-9 Benjamin, W. 271 Benozoglio, J.-L. 289 Berchtold, A.

La Suisse romande au cap du XXe siecle 289 Bercovitch, S. 374 376-7 Berger, P. 209 Berlin 244248 249 254 256 258260271 Bernard of Chartres 168 Bernard, C. 232236 Besant, W. & J. Rice The Ten Years' Tenant 44 Bessarion, Cardinal 163 Bestuzhev, A. 194-6 Betancourt, A. de

Gobierno po/{tjco de Nueva Espana 221 Bible 4 15 26 35-7 50n 124 129 150153192 212n 213n 422 bibliographic codes 387 Bibliographical Society 346 35735 8 bibliography 26 53 55 58 68 346 bibliophily, private book collecting 209-10 216 263 286 Biblioteca del Renacimiento Literario 235 236 Bibliotheca Corviniana 264 Biblioteca Marciana 163 Bibliotheca regnicolaris 263

Bibliothek der SchO'nen Wissenschafien und der Freyen Kiinste 245 249 Bibliotheque religieuse et nationale 290 Bidpai, fables of 99-100 Bidwell, J. 367 Bigot, A. 233 Bille, C. 289 birch bark 86 Bischoff, B. 147

Katalog 150 Blackwood (publisher) 405 406 40840941In Blackwood & Janet Paul (publishers) 395 Blackwood's Magazine 405 408 Blais, M.-C. 303

Le jour est noir 300 Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel 300301 Blake, W. 42 345 Blasco Ibailez, V. 235 Blayney, P. 360 block-printing see xylography Blind,M. 347 Bobbio 147 Boccaccio, G. 1314160161 163 164179183 Bodley Head, The (publisher) 347 Boie, C. (publisher) 258 Bond, E. 346 Bongi, S. 175 176 book clubs 21-2 286-7 297 300 33 2-3 Book of the Month Club 286 33 2

43 2

Book Society 332-3 334 Biicherguilde Gutenberg 286 Cercle du Livre 286 Jeunes romanciers canadiens 286 Les Editions Rencontre 286-7 book covers/jackets 302 324 335 338 339 407 book design, printing & typography 180-5215-23 256260284286310311 360 385 387-9 6 422 book illustration 95-113 passim 114n 122-4218-24 327400402 421 Book of the Dead 1033-5 book painting 95-113 passim book trade 254-5 255-65 307 bookbinding 129 163 164 221-3 22 5 228n 368 -9 395 42 3 booksellers 39 42 72 308 317 328 Bordon, B. 181 188n Borgeaud, G. 289 Borgia, L. 189n Borrul, J. 220

Borsenblatt 262 Biirsenverein 19261 Bosanquet, E.F. 357 Botrel, J.-F. 18-19423 Boturini, L. 217

Historia Septentrional de America 220-1223 Boudry 285 Bourdieu, P. 269 Bourgeuil, I. 291 Bouvier, N. 289 Bowers, F.

Principles of Bibliographical Description 359 Bradsher, E.L. 374 brahmi script 79 83 85 Braudcl, F. 87 Brault, M. 301 Brecht, B. 27 I Bremer, F. 373-4 Brennan, C. 399 Breton, A. 276

BrieJe uber den itzigen Zustand der schO'nen Wissenschafien in Deutschland 242 Briggs, W. 381 382 384n British and Foreign Bible

Index Society 129 130 British Library 362 British Museum Library 343-61 passim 371-2415 42 7n broadcasting 337420 Broglie, A. de

Memoires 273 Bronte,A.

Agnes Grey 44 Bronte, E.

Wuthering Heights 44 Brown,).D. 357 Browning, R. 345 Brunei, P.

Le phinomene des capitales litteraires 269 Brunetiere, F. 233 Brussels 256 284 Bucharest 257262 Budapest 257-65 passim Buddhism 65 79 87 BUGRA 262 Bulgarin, F. 196 Bullen, G. 37 1 373 Buftetin 400-4405 406 Bund, R. (bookseller) 262 Bunyan, J. 129-30 The Pilgrim's Progress 1023 121 122-4 Burckhardt 147 Burns, R. 421 Burriel, A.M. 217 220 Bury, S. 25-6 Butler, S. 348-9 The Humour of Homer 348 The Way ofAft Flesh 349 Unconscious Memory 348 Byzantine empire 16 192 Byzantium 147 Cadell,1: 43 Cadieux & Derome (booksellers) Z90 Caedmon 80 Caitanya, Hindu religious reformer 86 88-{) Caitanya-caritamrta 86 88-{)

Cahiers du RhOne z85 Cahiers vaudois Z92 calligraphy 87 99 100 Callimachus Pinalw 5 Cambaceres, E. z3z 233 Cambrai 147 Cambridge History ofAmerican

Literature (ed. Bercovitch) 374-7 Cambridge History ofAmerican Literature (ed. Trent) 374-5 Cambridge History of English Literature 414 Cambridge Modern History 352 Campbell, S. 38z-3 Canada 379-85 passim 418 Canadian Methodist Magazine 381 Candayan 86 Cane, M. z33 Canetti, E. 259260-1 canon, canonicity 39 40 43 49-50 z3 I 238 252-3 Z76 z81 285 z88 293 307-z1 passim 3z5 374424 Capajon 405 Cape,). (publisher) 404405 40 9 Capell, E. 355 Capodistria,). 255 z66n Caracciolo, P. 337 Caraquel z33 Carlos Antonio (Prince of Asturias) zI6 z23 Carlos Hierro, A. de Z34 Carlyle, 1: 345 Carolingian Empire 12 147-58 passim Carpentier, A. Le Recours de la methode 271 Carrier, R. 300 Carroll,). The Stripling Preacher 380 Casanova, P. 269-70 La Ripubljque mondiale des lettres Z69 Casgrain, Abbe z90 Casterman (publisher) z85 z87 z89 Z90 Caswell, E. 38z Cato 168 Origines 168 Caxton Press 393 396 Cendrars, B. z89 Z91 censorship z7 70 74 327-31 Centennial Historical Surveys 387-{) 395 396 Centre Educatif et Culturcl 301 Century Guild Hobby-Horse 357 ceramics 97 114

433

Cerda y Rico, F. 2 I 8 Cervantes, M. de Don Quixote 182II Chamoiseau, P.

Texaco Z92 Chang hen zhuan 62n Chang'an 53 54 55 chapbooks Z07214n Chapman & Hall (publishers) 44 Chaput, M. 301 Chapuys-Montlaville, L.-A. Z7 1 Charcot,J.-M. Z32 Charlemagne 13151 153154 Charles III (King of Spain) ZI6 ZZ3 Charlier, G. z89 Chartier, R. Z 77 IZ7 Charvat, W. 374376 378n Chatto & Windus (publishers) Z2325-40 Chaucer, G. 357 361 Troilus and Cresyde 346 Chekhov, A. 191 Chelles 150 Chessex,J. Les Saintes Ecritures 289 Chevrel, Y. z3z 235 237 China 5 7 53-63 passim 86-7 423-4 Chinula, C.C. 121 Chretien et les elections, Le Z99 Christian Guardian 379 380 381 384n Christie, A. 340 Chuanqi stories of the Tang and Song, Coftected 60 Cicero 1314151 160-7 passim 179 4 16 Academica 168 letters 168 Rhetorica 160 Cigler, J. Z62 Cingria, C.-A. Oeuvres completes 289 Circle Press 362 Cite libre Z97 'Clarin' 19232-3234236 La Regenta z35 Clark, R. & R. (printers) 331 clay tablet 3 34 codex 3 35 37 39 40-z Coffin Texts 32 33 Coleridge, S.T. 1742

Index collected editions 42 43 308 3 1 4- 1 7 Collins,}.C. 356 Cologne 147151 153 Coloma, L.

Pequeiieces 236-7 commonplace place 17 Communaute fram;:aise de Belgique et de la Promotion des Lettres 28 9 Comte, A. 233

Condesita, La 233 conduct books 126

Confidences d'un commissairt d 'ecole, Les 299 Congres de la propriete litteraire et artistique (1878) 279n Congres international des editeurs (1896) 270 Congrcs international des ecrivains pour la defense de la culture (1935) 271 Congreve, W. 20307-18 passim; library 318-19 Works 311 316 Conscience, H. 277

Consolation of Philosophy 151 Constable, T. & A. (printers) 33 1 Constantinople 259 262 Cooke,}. (publisher) 316 Cooper,}.F. 23 367 Copyright Act 1710 42419 copyright 42-7 308 373 Copyright Act 42 308 Corals, A. 263 Corbie 147 ISO 151 153154 Cornwall, B. 350 Cortes, H. 218 'Cartas de Relacion' 2 I 6

Historia de la Nueva Espana 218-20 cosmopolitan and vernacular 38939 6 Coster, C. de 292 Cotta (publisher) 255 Covici Friede (publisher) 328 Cowley, A. 314316317 Crabbe, G. 42 Cromberger,}. 210 Crombergers (printers) 218 Cyprian 153

Da Borgo San Sepolcro, D. 163 Da Brossano, F. 161 Da Pavia, L. 181 Dante Alighieri 1520179180 181 183-5 189n

Commedia 178 Darius 104107 D'Arlincourt, Vicomte 197 Darnton, R. 2 6 Darwin, C. 232 233 348 349 databases 98 102 104 Daud,M.86

Candayan 86 Daudet, A. 234235 236 276 Sapho 235 236 Daudet, L. 276 Davies, T. 43 Davis, A.H. 400 402

On Our Selection! Dawn 405

400-2

De Brocar, A.G. 212n De Eguia, M. 210 De Garibay, E. 208-9 De Gaulle, C. Memoires 299 De Gomara, L. 216 De Kock, P. 232 De la Mare, R. 416 De la Roche, M. 292 De Nait, A. 236 De Quincey, T. 345 De Worde, W. (printer) 346 De Zola Ii Apollinairt 292 Dead, Book of the 6101633-5

son Robinson Crusoe 47 Dclachaux (publisher) 288 Delvig, Baron 196 Deman, E. (bookseller/ publisher) 284286 289 Denham,}. 316 Dennery, A. 272

Derzhavin 193 Desbiens, }.-P. 299 Descartes 18 d'Este, Isabella 181

Description des Arts et Meriers 28 4

Detective 277 Deubner,}. (publisher) 259-60 261 Deutsche Buchhandel, Der 26 I

Devoir et patrie 277

434

Tilaka-manjari

80

Diaz del Castillo, B. 221 Dickens, C. 44-6373375

Little Dorrit 46 Martin Chuzzlewit 46 The Old Curiosity Shop 46 The Pickwick Papers 23 45-6

48 dictation 102

Dictionary of National Biography 343 Dido, Bp 153 digitisation 27-898 102-3362 Dion, G. & L. O'Neill

Le Chrerien et les elections 299 Dionisotti, C. 175176 Dionysio-Hadriana 153 Donne,}. 7 Dostoevsky, F. 191 Douglas, N. 333 337 Dresden 254 Droz (publisher) 288 Dryden,}. 202142307314 3 173 18 Annual Miscellany 309310 3 14

Examen Poeticum 309 Miscellany Poems 309 Poems on Affairs of State 3 I 0 Sylvae 309 Virgil 309310-1 1312-13 3 16 3 18 Du Bellay, J. 269

Defoe, D. 310

Les Deux Orphelines

Dewart, E.H. 381 Dhanapala, Sanskrit poet 79-80,9 2n

DeJJimse et Illustration de la langue franfoyse 17 269 Dubin, B. 194 Dubois,}. 290 Duhrovnik 267n Duckworth, G. (publisher) 405 406 409 Duff, E.G. 357 Dumas, A. 18270272-3275

Antony 272 Hen~y III et sa Cour 272 La Dame de Monsoreau 272 La Marechale d'Ancre 272 Le Chevalier de MaisonRouge 273 Lt Comle de Monte-Cristo 27 2

Le Vicomte de Bragelonne 27 2

Index Les Trois Mousqetaires 272 Vingt Ans apris 272 Dunhuang 54 87 Dupuis (publisher) 289 Durand, P. 285 Eastman, M.H.

Aunt Phillis's Cabin; or Southern Life as it is 369 E~a de Queiroz, J.M. de 232 233 o primo Basilio 233 234236 Ecrits du Canada franrais 297 Editions de l'Age de I'Homme 289 Editions de la Baconniere 285 Editions du Carrefour 288 education 51631477074 138-40 142 193 198 educational publishing 128 274 276301 382 -3 EEBO 361 Egan, P. Life in London 45 Eggimann (publisher) 286 Egoist Press 337 Egypt 3531-235141-2423 Ehrenbourg, I. 271 Einhard 154 Eisenstein, E. 77 88 ekdosis 141 Ekiken, K. 70 Wazoku dojikun 70 Eliot, S. 10 15 20 21 2224419 Eliot, T.S. 335416 Prufrock and other Observations 337 The Varieties ofMetaphysical Poetry 415 Ellis, R. 352 Ellis sale 352 Emerson, R.W. 345 Nature 367 Emich, G. (publisher) 265 Marci chronica de gestis Hungarorum 265 Empson, W. 326 En, N. 7172 Encyclopedie 284 Engelsing, R. 254 English Literature: an Illustrated Record 349351 engraving 221 Enlightenment 18 Ennius 168169 Eiitviis, J. 265

A[alujegyzoje 264 Eperjes 265 ephemera 207210 epic 9596 epigram 37-40 epigraphy 85 100 Erne, L. 361 ESTC 361 Espana moderna, La (publisher) 235 Etherege, G. 316317 Evans, C. (publisher) 334

Everyman 337 Examiner 310 Extensive records for the time of Supreme Peace 5-16 passim 55 56-8 59 Extraordinary hearsay 58 Faber & Faber (publishers) 326 3354 16- 17 Fabian, B. 17 19420 Fahy, C. 177 178 Fallis, S. 382 Faquineto (publisher) 235 Farnese family 185 Faulkner, W. 326331 Fayard, A. (publisher) 270275 Febvre, L. 2 175 176 Feijoo, B. 216 Ferdinand VI 216220 Ferenczi, J. 275 Ferron, J. 300303 Ferry,). 273 Festetich, Gy. 263 Fhal, P. 270272 Fick (publisher) 286 Filipacchi (publisher) 288

Fille Elisa, La 233

Forster, E.M. 271 325 Fortunio

Regole 85 Foxon, D.E 361 France 420 422 France, A. 269 276 Francia 147 Franklin, M. 25 399-400 406-8 41In My Brilliant Career 399 408

Fraser's Magazine 344 Frechette, L. 292 Freculf of Lisieux 151 Freeman, H.W.

Hester 331 Joseph and his Brethren 331 33 2 Freising 147153 French (language) 192 286 288-9 2 295n 372 Friskney, J. 23-4 Frost,J. Lives of Eminent Christians 349 Fry, R. 325 335 Fulda 147 148 151 154 funerary texts 32-3 Furnivall, EJ. 345 Furphy,J. 399400401-4410 Rigby's Romance 401 Such is Life 399401-4410 The Buln Buln and the Brolga 401 Gaboriau, E. 232 Gabriel de BorbOn y Sajonia, Infante 223 226 Gagnon, J.-L.

La mort d'un negre 300

Firdausi 95-113 passim Shahnama 89 95-113 114n Fitzgerald, ES.

Galen 141 416 Galileo, G.

The Great Gatsby 326 Flammarion (publisher) 290 Flaubert, G. 271 272 Madame Bovary 277 Fleury 147150 Florence 179261 Florus 168 Florus of Lyons 151 Folger Library 361 Fontaine, M. (bookseller) 261-2 Fontenelle, B. 148 format 1416202539-4042 163 177-8 183 196 199

Galland, B. 289 Gallimard, G. (publisher) 18 277 278 282 Ganz, D. 912 13 24 Garnett, D.

435

Discorsi 417

Beany-Eye 327 Lady into Fox 327 No Love 331 Pocahontas 333 The Grasshoppers Come 327 Garnett, E. 25404405406409 Garnett, Ray 327 Garnett, Richard 25-6 343-53 357

Index De Flagello Myrteo 345-6 Essays in Librarianship and Bibliography 345 346 Essays of an Ex-Librarian 345 Idylls and Epigrams 345 10 in Egypt 344 Poems 347 Poems from the German 344 Primula 344 Relics of Shelley 344 Twilight of the Gods, The 345348 349 Garnett, Richard (father of above) The Philological Essays 344 Garnett, T. 345 Garrick, D. 355 Gautier, T. 271 Gay,}. 316 Geneva 284 286 Genji, Tale of 4-16 passim 21 66-74423424 George, A. 34 German (language) 253-6288 37 2 Germany 420421 Gesellschaft fur iiltere deutsche Geschichstkunde 255 Gibbons, P. 390 Gide, A. 271 276 gift books 16-17205n Gilgamesh 5 7 10 14 16 3435 Giolito family 175 176 Gissing, G. 347 New Grub Street 44 Glikis (publishers) 261 Glinka, F. 200 Glinka, S.N. 198 globalization 237-8 292 Glover, D. 393 395 39 6 Godin, G. 301 303 Goebel, Th. 262 Goethe,}.W von 243255 Dichtung und Wahrheit 258 The Sorrows of Young Werther 274 Gog and Magog 104107 Goldsmith, 0. 346 Goncourt brothers 234276 Gimgora, L. de 211 Gonzalez Barcia, A. 216 Ensayo de Historia de la Florida 216 Historiadores Primitivos de Indias Occidentales 216

217218227n Goody Two-Shoes 346 gospel book 150 Gosse, E. 349-51 A Short History of Modern English Literature 351 Gray 350 Gosvamins 86 89 Giittingen 255 258 260 Goyeneche,}. de 217 Grasset (publisher) 283 Gray, T. 350 Graz 260 Great Britain 307-21 pa.lsim 323-42 passim 418 419 Grech, N. 196 Greek Anthology 16 Greene, R. 356 Greg, WW. 355-9 passim 415 Gregory, St 153 Moralia 150 Grierson, H.}.C. 326 Griffin, C. 18 417 Griffin,}. 143n Grimm, J. 255 Grove, F.P. Settlers of the Marsh 383 Gsteiger, M. La Nouvelle litterature romande 289 Gudkov, L. 194 Guernier, L. du 315 Guise, R. 273 Gujarati language and literature 83 Gutenberg,}. 15178 Gwynn, E. 355

J'accuse les assassins de Coffin 299 Heenan,}. 389 395 Heffer, E.W (bookseller) 328 Heidelberg 261 Heine, H. 349 Heinemann (publisher) 334 Hemacandra, Jain teacher 88 Siddha-HemacandraSabdanusasanam 88 Hemingway, E. 405 A Farewell to Arms 340 A Moveable Feast 271 Herder,}.G. von 19 Fragmente uber die neuere deutsche Literatur 246 Heredia sales 346-7 352 Herodotos 138 Herrera, A. de Las Decadas 221223 Herrera Tordesillas, H. de Decadas 217 Herringman, H. (bookseller) 30931631732m Hersfeld 148 Hesiod 138 139 Hetzel,J. 285 hieroglyphs 32 Hillenbrand, R. 89421 Hilliard, C. 389 Hindi language and literature 83 85-6 Hinduism 79 82 Hinman,C. The Printing ... first Folio of Shakespeare 360 Histoire de I'idition franfaise

Hachette, L. (publisher / bookseller) 275286287-8 301 30 3 Haistwell, E. 311 Hall,R. The Well of Loneliness 328 Hamburg 255 258 Hammer-Purgstall, J. von 255 Hammond, P. 308310 Hanse,}. 289 Harding, R.C. 398n Harley, R. 310 Harrassowitz,o. (publisher) 261-2 Hasse, }.A. 103 Hawthornden Prize 331 Hebert,}. (publisher) 297-305

Histoire illustree des lettres franfaises de Belgique 289 Historia de D. Fernando Co/t5n 216 Historia General de los hechos de los castellanos en las islas y tierra firme 217 Hochman, B. 377 Hodder & Stougbton (publishers) 324325 Hofmeyr, I. 9-1025421 Hogal,}.A. de 218 Hogarth Press 325335 Holstenius, L.416 Holt, H. (publisher) 332 Homer 5-14 passim 35 39 42 83 96-7 102 141 143n 144n 164169348

417

Index Iliad 10 I I 39 95 96 133-42 I43 n

Odyssey 10 I I 3996 134-42 I44n Hope,]. 360 Hours, Books of 34 Howard, H. 415 Howells, w.D. 375 Howsarn, L. 129 Hrabanus Maurus 151 153 154 Hu Yinglin 60 Hughes,]. 314 Hughes,R.

A High Wind in Jamaica 334-5340 Hugo, V. 270-6 passim 277 279n 284 Hernani 272 Us Misirahles 272284285 28 9

Marion Delorme 272 Hungarian (language) 262-5 Hungarica 263 Hutton, R. 344-5 Huxley, A. 271 325 327 334

Antic Hay 328 Brave New World 331 Jesting Pilate 334 hymn books 124 Ibarra,]. 2 I 6 227n Ibrahim ibn Marnshadh, Arabic poet 99 Illesh:\Zy, L 263

Impertinences of Brother Anonymous, The 299 Index librorum prohibitorum 27 22 73 India 423-4 Indies, Chronicles of the 21 5-23

Insolences du [rire Unfel, Les 2993 05 Iran 7995-I13 Irving, W. 367 Isabella d'Este 181 Isambert, E. I tineraire 262 Ise, Tales of 70 Isidore of Seville 153 Iskander see Alexander the Great Islamicate literature and culture 83 86 95 99 Jainism 79

James, H. 276 Jancovic, E. (bookseller) 267n Janin,]. 276 285 Jankovich, M. 263 Japan 765-75 passim Jasmin, C. 303 Jean Paul 254 Jeans,].

The Mysterious Universe

420

Jeheber (publisher) 288 Jerez, F. 217 Jerome, St 153 Jewett, ].P. (publisher) 368 369 jobbing printing 207 John Chrystostom, St 153

John

o'London's Weekly

337

John the Scot 151 Johnson, S. 43247316358

Lives of the Poets 2 I Proposals for Printing ... Works of Shakespeare 35 8-9 Jokai, M. 265 Jonas of Orleans 153 Jones, G. 346 Jones, ]. W. 346 Jonson, B. IS 2040-244

Epigrams 40 Works 404142316 Josephus 153 Joshi, P. 128 Josika, M. Abaft 264 Jour, Le 297

Journal etranger 244 245 246 journalism 264310 Joyce,]. 271325

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 337 Ulysses 325333335 Juan y Santacilia]. 220 Julien, P. 301 Julleville, L. P. de

Histoire de la langue et de la liltirature [ran;aise 414

Karamzin, N. 193 194 Aglaia 194 Aonidy 194

History of the Russian State 193 Karlovac 260 Kaspi, A. & A. Mares

Le Paris des ifrangers depuis un siicle 269 Kastan, D.S. 20-1 Kaveh 99 Kaviraj, K.

Caitanya-caritamrta 86 88-9 Kelmscott Press 361 Kemeny, Zs. 265 Kernan, A. 43 Keszthely 263 Kettell, S.

Specimens ofAmerican Verse 367 Khwaja Dahhani, Turkish poet 101-2 Kiev 262 King, R. 362 Kingsley, C. 373 375 Kirsop, W. 399 Kistemaeckers, H. (bookseller) 28 4 Kit-Cat Club 3II Klincksieck, R 26 I Klopstock, RG.

Deutsche Gelehrtenrepublik 25 8 Konigsberg 258 Kopitar, B. 255 Koran see Qur'an Korea 7 57 65 68 Kornicki, P. 78413 Kramnick, ].B.

Making the English Canon 30 7 Krishna Deva Raya, king of Vijayanagara 82

Amukta-malyada 82

Jumicges 151 Junta,]. de 2 I 7 Juven, R 275 Juvenal 156

Krsnadasa Kaviraj, Bengali poet 82 86 88-9 Krylov, LA. 193 Kulturverleger 19 Kiindig (publisher) 286

Kabir, Hindi poet 83 Kafka, R 260 Kannada (language) 81 8586 Kant, L 241 Kanidy, V. 264 Karadzic, V. 255

La Fontaine,]. de Fables 277 Lacroix, Verboeckoven & Cie (booksellers/publishers) 28 4 28 9 Lactantius 168

437

Index Laffont, R. (publisher) 286 30 3 Lagarde, Alexandre de 259 Lagarde, Andre & M. Decaudin

Manuel d'histoire lilliraire de la France 29 I Landon, R. 25 Lane,). (publisher) 345347-8 Lanson, G. 271 Laon ISO 151 153 Lapointe, G.

Le Premier mot 300 Ode au Saint-Laurent 300 Lathbury, nc. 357 Latin (language) 12 83 85 153 154 176-85 passim 260 263 420 Lauder, W.

Essay on Milton's Use and Imitation in his Paradise Lost 242 Lausanne 284 286 289 Lautreaumont, Comte de

Les Chants de Maldoror 284 Lawrence, nH. 325

Lady Challerley's Lover 5 29 n 306n 325 328 333

The Rainbow 325 328 Lawrence, W.}. 359 Lawson, H. 400 404-8

In the Days When the World Was Wide 405 Short Stories in Verse and Prose 405 While the Billy Boils 405 LeMans 150 Leavis, F.R. 326

Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture 323 Leavis, Qn 22 326-40 passim Fiction and the Reading Public 3233 25333 Leblanc, M. 275 277 lectionary 150 Lee, S. 343 Lehmann, R. 340

A Note in Music 333 Dusty Answer 332 Invitation to the Waltz 327 33 2 Leiden 416417 Leipzig 19 254-62 passim Leo X, pope 185 Leon Pinelo, A. de 217

Biblioteca Oriental y

Occidental 217223 Lepape, P.

Le pays de la littirature 292 Lerouge, G.

Le Mystirieux Docttur Cornelius 276-7 Leroux, G. 2775277 Lesperance, E. 298 300 Lesperance, P. 303 Lessing, G.E. 19242246

Letters 246 Levy, M. & C. (publishers) 270 275 2762 77 Lewis, W. 325 334337

The Art of Being Ruled 334 The Childermass 337 The Diabolical Principle 334 The Human Age 337 Tarr 337 Time and Western Man 334 Lezcano y Cia (publisher) 235 Li Wa zhuan 62n Librairie Garneau 301 libraries 495209216217 220-1 223 260 261 262 263 286 303 314323 326-3 I

343-65 passim libraries (circulating) 21-2 43-4 69 192 Library Association 328 346 35 6 Library, The 357361 Licensing Act 308310

Lie nil zhuan 70 Liege 283 285

Life and Letters 334

4 13423 Lorenz & Keil (booksellers) 262 Lorenzana, Cardinal 218-21 Lorsch 147 148 151 154 Loti, P. 275 276

Le Mariage de Loti 275 Pecheur d'Islande 275276 Louis the German 154 Louis the Pious 147 151 153 Lovay, }.-M. 289 Love, H. 309 Lowry, B. 393 395 396 Lowry,M.

The World of Aldus Manutius 176 Lu Xun 59-60 Lubetsky, S. 356 Luca da Penna 160 Lucas, E.V. 405408 Lugones, B. 233 Lupus of Ferrieres 15 I Liisebrink, H.-]. 204n Lyons 147208 McAleer,). 323 Macaulay, T.B. 373 McCormick, E. 393 396

Letters and Art in New Zealand 389-90 McEldowney, n 393 395 McGrath, R. 394 McGraw-Hili (publishers) 383 McKenzie, nF. 2308311 314

The Cambridge University Press,1696-1712 360

limited editions 333-5 337 4 22 -3 literacy 3 5 10357077 80 192

McKerrow, R.B. 358

Literary History of the United Statts 374-5

McLaverty,). 21 Macmillan (publisher) 43 128 Macmillan's Magazine 344345 Macrobius 151 167 Madrid 271 Maguire, L.E. 359-60 Mahabharata 8 80 102 Mainz 15147148150151

literary prizes 287331-2423 literary property 42-3 Livy 94042151 153 154168

Roman History 164 Ljubljana 262 London 247248259261 271 28 3343-53 Longfellow, H.W. 23,421 Longman Paul (publisher) 395 Lopez Bago, E. 233 235 236 La Buscona 236

La prostituta 236 La querida 236 Lopez, C. 210 Lopez-Vidriero, M.L. 1718

Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students 359

Making New Zealand 389 Malawi 121 Mallarme, S. 284 Malone Society 358 Malraux, A. 271 Mangot, ).-B. (bookseller) 262 Mann, H. 271 Mann, N. 13 14 Mannheim 261

Index Mantua 181 maps 218 220 263 Marabout (publisher) 287 28 9 Marathi language and literature 81-2 Mares, A. 269 Marrou, H.I. 138 Martial 15 20 37-40 42 5 In

Apophoreta 39-42 Liber Spectaculorum 39 Martin, H.-J. 2 175 176 Martini, S. 13 161 162 164 mathematics 415 Mather, C. 318 Mathews, E. 347 Maucci (publisher) 232 235 Maulana Daud, Hindi poet 86 Maupassant, G. de 234 Maurois, A. Ariel 340 Mayans y Siscar, G. 18216-21 passim 229n 230 Mecca 104 Medina del Campo 207 208 Mena, F.M. de 217 Mendelssohn, M. 19 242 245 Mercure de France, Le 276 Merouvel, c. Chaste et jlhrie 272 275 Mesplet, F. Reglement 347 Messageries duJour, Les 303 Methodism 379-85 passim Methodist Book & Publishing House 381 Michaux, H. 282 Michelet,}. 284 Michon,}. I 18287 Middle Indic languages 81 85 Milan 14161 Miller, H. 271 Miller, P. 376 Mills & Boon (publishers) 325 Milne, A.A. 326 335 Milton,}. 307 314 345 Paradise Lost 316 Milza, P. & A. Mares Le Paris des hrangers depuis 1945 26 9 Mirbeau, 0. 276 Mirecourt Fabrique de romans: Maison Alexandre Dumas et Cie 273 Miron, G. 301

Mirror for Princes 109 I 10 miscellanies 309-10314-16 missions I missionary printing

78

Mitau 258-