The Printed Reader

Gender, Quixotism, and Textual Bodies in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Amelia Dale

2019
230 pages
$34.95
ISBN 9781684481026
Transits

The Printed Reader explores the transformative power of reading in the eighteenth century, and how this was expressed in the fascination with Don Quixote and in a proliferation of narratives about quixotic readers, readers who attempt to reproduce and embody their readings. Through intersecting readings of quixotic narratives, including work by Charlotte Lennox, Laurence Sterne, George Colman, Richard Graves, and Elizabeth Hamilton, Amelia Dale argues that literature was envisaged as imprinting - most crucially, in gendered terms - the reader's mind, character, and body. The Printed Reader brings together key debates concerning quixotic narratives, print culture, sensibility, empiricism, book history, and the material text, connecting developments in print technology to gendered conceptualizations of quixotism. Tracing the meanings of quixotic readers' bodies, The Printed Reader claims the social and political text that is the quixotic reader is structured by the experiential, affective, and sexual resonances of imprinting and impressions.

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Reviews
"The Printed Reader exemplifies the best kind of scholarship, combining immense learning about material culture with astute close textual readings, readings attentive at once to sense and nuance, as well as to the materiality of the page and of print technology. The many new understandings that emerge from this alembic are adroitly introduced back into the crucible of scholarly conversations on all the many interconnected aspects of eighteenth-century literature and culture which it has brought together." - Eighteenth-Century Studies, Spring 2023

"Dale is particularly illuminating on the sexual suggestions of printing and being imprinted, demonstrating in an ingenious reading of Tristram Shandy (1759 - 67) how the novel's typographical games produce 'descriptions of erotic pleasure that exist beyond the penis and repeatedly represent male-gendered bodies as being as (sexually) penetrable as the female body is typically identified as being' (72)." -Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Spring 2022

"Don Quixote's influence on eighteenth-century fiction is too pervasive to ignore, and Dale's The Printed Reader makes an important new argument about the nature of quixotic reading. With attention to the gendered implications of reading as an act of imprinting the mind, Dale's skillful analysis of quixotic novels and the history of printing is both timely and illuminating."-Aaron R. Hanlon, Colby College

"The Printed Reader offers a multifaceted and chronological argument about the quixote as an impressionable reader whose reading practice reflects the printing technologies from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries.... Dale draws on a range of eighteenth-century contexts - philosophy, play acting, sensibility, spirituality (Methodism), and politics (Jacobinism) - to demonstrate convincingly that the quixotic reader was indeed a satirical trope."-Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Winter 2020/21

"Dale conducts a subtle and interestingly circular argument about quixotism and gender....[A]n ingenious, energetic and polished book, which cleverly associates a number of current critical concerns."-Times Literary Supplement

"The Printed Reader is a brilliant contribution to the study of how eighteenth-century British writers understood Don Quixote and deployed quixotic parody in their works."-Journal of British Studies

"The eponymous figuration 'printed reader' signals allegiance to a metaphor crucial to the text and as noble as any, the impressible human mind: sensations impress or imprint on the mouldable mind making impressions that shape consciousness and how we read the world."-The Shandean

About the author:

Amelia Dale is a lecturer in the School of Languages and Literature at the Shanghai University of International Business and Economics in China.

Distributed by Rutgers University Press

Cloth: $99.95, 978-1-6844-8103-3; EPUB: $34.95, 978-1-6844-8104-0