The Work of Writing

the long version

As today's new technologies challenge the reign of writing, Clifford Siskin puts our current concerns about such change into historical context. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain, he argues, the "new" technology was writing itself. How did its proliferation - in print and through silent reading - coalesce into the dominant forms of literary modernity, and with what consequences? What changed, strikingly and fundamentally, were ways of knowing and of working. These new divisions of knowledge and of labor were the work of writing, as was the engendering, at their intersection, of the discipline that took writing itself as its professional work - Literature. Mixing periods, genres, and genders, as well as crossing disciplinary and geographical borders - into sociology and communication theory and up through Scotland - The Work of Writing challenges the ways that we've known Literature - from the rise of the novel to the subjectivity of the lyric. It not only remembers previously excluded women writers, but it explains how Literature forgot them. The range of authors and links to the social will appeal to a wide audience, from specialists in the literature and history of those times and places (eighteenth-century scholars and Romanticists) to general readers already engaged by newly troubling technologies of their own.