Book-men, Book Clubs, and the Romantic Literary Sphere

This book re-reads the tangled relations of book culture and literary culture in the early nineteenth century by restoring to view the figure of the bookman and the effaced history of his book clubs. As outliers inserting themselves into the matrix of literary production rather than remaining within that of reception, both provoked debate by producing, writing, and circulating books in ways that expanded fundamental points of literary orientation in lateral directions not coincident with those of the literary sphere. Deploying a wide range of historical, archival and literary materials, the study combines the history and geography of books, cultural theory, and literary history to make visible a bookish array of alterative networks, genres, and locations obscured by the literary sphere in establishing its authority as arbiter of the modern book.

Ina Ferris is emeritus professor of English at the University of Ottawa. Her books include The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History and the Waverley Novels, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland, and Bookish Histories: Books, Literature, and Commercial Modernity, 1700-1900 (co-edited with Paul Keen).