Dreaming in Books - uncopy

Bibliographic Subjects / 7
If romantic bibliographic culture has much to tell us about the past and
present nature of the book, it also, I want to suggest, has much to tell us
about the pressures being exerted by digital media today and thus concerns
the future of the book as well. A history of the romantic book and the romantic
bibliographic imagination is in this sense also a history of media
adaptation. A study of how nineteenth- century individuals became wedded
to or possessed by their books can broaden our perspective of the nature of
“new media” cultures and historical experiences of “media transition.” 29 It
can offer parallels, but also differences, to our current process of adapting
to communicative change. Knowledge of the book’s past can be a key tool
in negotiating our digital future. As Carla Hesse has argued, “The striking
parallels between the late eighteenth and late twentieth centuries’ cultural
debates suggest to me that what we are witnessing in the remaking of the
‘modern literary system’ at the end of the twentieth century is not so much
a technological revolution (which has already occurred) but the public reinvention
of intellectual community in its wake.” 30 If a basic and increasingly
urgent concern of academics of my generation is how we will adapt to the
pressures and opportunities that digital forms of communication present
us, then a study of romantic bibliographic culture can offer an important
case study for such institutional and personal transformations. How were
careers and communities made—and lost—through different strategies surrounding
the medium of the book?
At the same time that romantic book culture offers important parallels
to contemporary digital culture, there are also important continuities at work
between these two distinct regimes of communication. 31 While we have a
tremendous amount of scholarship exploring the novelty of digital media,
we have far fewer historical contextualizations that are able to put those differences
into perspective. 32 This book argues that many of the most pressing
communicative concerns facing us today are not unique to the digital age
but emerged with a particular sense of urgency during the bookish upheavals
of the romantic age. A history of the romantic book offers insights into
where and when some of the most salient issues surrounding communication
today emerged. What did it mean to reimagine a literary work as
residing not in a single book but as part of an interrelated bibliographic
network? What was the cultural status of the copy and how did it relate to
a larger reformulation of notions like novelty and innovation? What did
it mean to process an existing yet largely forgotten cultural heritage from
one medium to another? How was one to contend with the growing availability
of writing, where such availability was increasingly understood to
be a problem? Finally, what did it mean to imagine creativity as an act of