Literary Wars on the Bookshelf: Women Authors and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century England = Literary Wars on the Bookshelf: Women Authors and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century England

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Mr. Darcy’s concern about “the neglect of a family library in such days as these” in Pride and Prejudice invites us to question what implications the family library had for him and what contexts he refers to in connecting the condition of the family library directly with his society, or, more exactly, with the print culture during the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. Beginning with the question raised by Darcy’s picturing of his days, this study first attempts to re-examine the conflicting landscapes of the period’s print culture(s) that have been offered by the recent scholarship of the last twenty years.
At the very opposite of the gentlemen’s libraries were commercial lending libraries. The circulating libraries were an emanation of the rapid growth in the book industry and the increased commercialization of literary production, thereby serving as one of the most important forces behind the new generic recognition and popularity of the novel, particularly of those authored by women. Women novelists thus made significant, if not dominant, contribution to popular reading culture, and the rate of their rapid increase in the proportion of the market share made women authors one of the most visible features in print culture during the time.
Countering both with critical and commercial pressures of the time, these women authors assumed the role of literary agency to promote the readerly culture, which, this study suggests, was nurtured in their reading of the novel. Many women authors show their awareness of literary and cultural power as readers who could affect readers’ choice of reading as well as ways of reading, and Austen’s literary formulation of the readerly culture in Northangger Abbey is an exemplary instance that illustrates her sister authors’ participation in the formation of print culture.