Introduction: Romantic Cultures of Print – From Miscellaneity to Dialectic

The essays collected here consider the uses of print in Romantic literary culture across a broad spectrum of objects, practices, people, and spaces, both institutional and geographic. Our goal was to choose outstanding work, predominantly by emerging scholars (with some notable exceptions), that reflects how innovative approaches to the uses of print around 1800 can generate compelling new literary histories of the period. Indeed, one of the questions this issue raises for us is whether literary history of the Romantic period – a period both deeply suffused by print media and profoundly conflicted about such suffusion – can be written without recourse to questions of the role and meaning of print within everyday social, political and artistic life. As scholars coming from different national perspectives, it was also important for us that a collection of essays on Romanticism and print showcase how these issues resonate beyond a single national culture. We’re interested in expanding our sights – and hopefully those of other researchers in the field – to a more international context, one that would put essays focused on literatures in English, German or French into dialogue with work being done in each of the other national traditions. The move beyond any single national framework will help expose us not only to the many parallels taking place across Europe and North America during this period. It will also underscore how one of the signature features of Romantic print cultures was a growing interconnectivity of literary markets (putting pressure on Benedict Anderson’s still influential thesis about the strong coupling of print and nationalism). Finally, attention to a more international context can allow us to see the extent to which the spread of print was a major factor in changing notions of locality itself, the way the international increasingly came to inflect the national and vice versa. The result of such preliminary considerations is a collection of essays that, while addressing an overlapping set of concerns, do not necessarily stand as part of a single argument about the importance of print for Romantic period writing. There are no grand theses here, or perhaps better stated, that is our thesis. Whether understood as action or object (“to print” or “a print”), print by the turn of the nineteenth century does many different things at once. This seems only appropriate as one of the distinctive features of the Romantic period was a marked increase in the quantitative output of printed material, an increase that gave rise to profound anxieties about problems of cultural surplus and heterogeneity and led many to announce the decline of literature itself. The emphasis on “cultures of print” in our title is an attempt to reflect upon this distinctive feature of the growing miscellaneity of Romantic literary life. It is intended to shift attention away from a conception of print in which print is too often seen as a single and singular outcome, effect, or action, and towards a more process-based understanding of an activity that includes diverse networks of advisors, collaborators, printers, publishers, editors, booksellers, and multiple communities of readers (as well as listeners)—networks that merge and separate as they shift and change over time. The attempt to shift emphasis from “print culture” to “cultures of print,” then, should be understood as an initial foray into focusing on the miscellaneous and the non-singular as key theoretical categories—or, alternately stated, as an attempt to theorize a methodological framework that can account for increasing degrees of cultural and medial heterogeneity. This is not, however, to suggest that no coherent sense can be made out of this collection (or any other for …