“I was plunged into this great ocean of reading without compass”: (Un)Regulated Reading in the Works of Scott and Wollstonecraft
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Unprecedented changes in the condition and the practice of reading created contemporaries’ deep concerns and anxieties about reading during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and the contemporary views of reading were deeply infused, and defused, by other cultural and ideological apparatuses of the time, such as gender and class ideologies, disciplinary norms, and productions of knowledge. Reading became recurrent literary tropes in fiction during the time as well, an examination of which allows us to see how contemporaries perceived their new reading and what ideological and cultural questions were involved in their literary concerns about reading. As Early childhood and adolescent life became more central in contemporary fiction’s characterization of protagonists, moreover, the role of reading habits gained more importance as shown in the reading practices of Emily in Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Waverley in Scott’s Waverley, and Mary in Wollstonecraft’s Mary, A Fiction. These characters are presented to underscore the contemporary’s view of the connection between reading and the formation of a reader’s self, which promoted the contemporary idea about the regulation of reading. Paradoxically, however, these literary works’ close attention to their young characters’ imaginations and feelings undercuts the conduct book’s normative instructions for reading. Reading for Waverley and Mary, in particular, illuminates the double potentials of reading’s influence, the tension between which remains unresolved to the end of the novels. The double-edged difficulties that these fictional readers show are, in fact, the same difficulties that are faced not only by historical readers of the time but also by later fictional writers in their continued explorations of reading.
Abstract
Unprecedented changes in the condition and the practice of reading created contemporaries’ deep concerns and anxieties about reading during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and the contemporary views of reading were deeply infused, and defused, by other cultural and ideological apparatuses of the time, such as gender and class ideologies, disciplinary norms, and productions of knowledge. Reading became recurrent literary tropes in fiction during the time as well, an examination of which allows us to see how contemporaries perceived their new reading and what ideological and cultural questions were involved in their literary concerns about reading. As Early childhood and adolescent life became more central in contemporary fiction’s characterization of protagonists, moreover, the role of reading habits gained more importance as shown in the reading practices of Emily in Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Waverley in Scott’s Waverley, and Mary in Wollstonecraft’s Mary, A Fiction. These characters are presented to underscore the contemporary’s view of the connection between reading and the formation of a reader’s self, which promoted the contemporary idea about the regulation of reading. Paradoxically, however, these literary works’ close attention to their young characters’ imaginations and feelings undercuts the conduct book’s normative instructions for reading. Reading for Waverley and Mary, in particular, illuminates the double potentials of reading’s influence, the tension between which remains unresolved to the end of the novels. The double-edged difficulties that these fictional readers show are, in fact, the same difficulties that are faced not only by historical readers of the time but also by later fictional writers in their continued explorations of reading.
참고문헌 (30)
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