The widening circle : essays on the circulation of literature in eighteenth-century Europe
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The widening circle : essays on the circulation of literature in eighteenth-century Europe
(Haney Foundation series, 20)
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976
Available at 14 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
"The 1974 A. S. W. Rosenbach Fellowship in Bibliography at the University of Pennsylvania was devoted to the fifth annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies."--Introduction
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Three distinguished authorities offer informed reflections on the history of books, on literary commerce, and on the reading public in eighteenth-century England, France, and Germany. Concerned with an area of study that has gone largely unexplored-the social function of the book trade and the various agencies of distribution-Robert Darnton. Roy M. Wiles, and Bernhard Fabian lay the groundwork for the intellectual, social, and literary historian as well as the student of political revolutions.
Robert Darnton's rich account of a clandestine book dealer expands our knowledge of the actual habits of eighteenth-century Frenchmen. We learn about the livres philosophiques, as they were known in the trade-obscene. irreligious. or seditious works; about the intricate circuit of agents linking publisher and bookdealer; and about a confidence game often surviving on sheer bravura. Darnton not only gives us a general sense of the literary tastes in a small provincial city in France on the eve of the Revolution but also opens the way toward an understanding of the country's entire literary underground.
The late Roy M. Wiles investigates the principal readership in eighteenth-century England and demonstrates that intellectual activities were not confined to polite society in London. Employing new, often untouched materials-newspaper circulation and delivery figures, book lists and advertisements in London and local papers, subscription books in provincial towns and cities-Wiles helps dispel some of the uncertainty surrounding the question of literacy and shows that, in fact, what the provincial readers chose to read more accurately registers the eighteenth century's relish for reading than those books considered by Londoners as "required" reading.
Bernhard Fabian explores the sources that permit us to assess the circulation of English letters in Germany during the second half of the eighteenth century. By considering the kind of information obtained from subscription lists, by studying the relation of English literature to the general reader of the period, and by examining the emergence of a reading public that actually read English, Fabian helps delineate a broad view of the contemporary reading scene in eighteenth-century Germany.
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