Techno-Prosthetic Romantic FuturismBookbustersThe conservatives, Wordsworth and Coleridge, were happy to advance their little revolution at the level of language and content. [1] The radicals wanted to change the way books worked. No one more keenly understood the book business than William Blake. No one more deeply feared it. His response: to build a better book from the bottom up. He invented a new process, a new product, a new conception of the book as multiplicity. [2] Byron too: those serial stanzas, those accumulating couplets. They materialize a book too big for rag and type. [3] Romanticism against the text! Books aren't just objects. They're events, organisms! Notes1. What a timid thing Lyrical Ballads seems in retrospect! See, Lyrical Ballads , ed. W. J. B. Owen (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1967). 2. See Joseph Viscomi William Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998). 3. George Gordon, Lord Byron, "Don Juan," Byron, ed. Jerome McGann (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986), 373-879. Navigation |