Book Abridgment in Eighteenth-Century England.

摘要

In the following dissertation, I examine the commercialization of abridgment and posit that the ubiquity of abridged literature challenges long-held assumptions regarding literary history, the history of reading, and the formation of the English literary canon.;It is unfortunate that so much modern scholarship tends to characterize book abridgment as subordinate to "original" authorship, dismissing it as a parasitic literary practice that feeds off legitimate literature. But the historical reality is that many of the literary texts that we write about and teach to our students are not the texts average English readers are likely to have encountered. Following the lapse of the Print Licensing Act in 1695, commercial print production surged and people across England's urban centers were confronted with a deluge of print, much of which was relatively affordable, such as broadsides, pamphlets, and daily gazettes. Books, however, remained expensive. Abridgments performed a valuable socio-cultural function by expanding access to once-expensive literature while also reducing the time investment to consume literature. Abridgments expanded access geographically, as well, because provincial and colonial American printers found a ready market for abridged texts. By 1800, roughly three times as many abridgments of Robinson Crusoe had been printed than had editions of the original, mostly by Scottish publishers operating out of Edinburgh and Glasgow. In North America, the first unabridged edition of Robinson Crusoe was not printed until 1819, whereas abridgments had been printed regularly since the 1780s. Abridgments expanded access intellectually by adapting style, form, and rhetoric for diverse audiences with varying levels of reading proficiency. The Methodist luminary John Wesley found Paradise Lost too esoteric for the average English reader, so he altered, abridged, and annotated it without breaking Milton's blank verse. Moreover, it was John Wynne's abridgment of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding that was widely read by students at the universities, not Locke's original. This story is repeated time and time again, not only for novels but for historically significant works across all genres of literature. "Book Abridgment in Eighteenth-Century England" contributes new knowledge regarding the popularity of abridgment, but it also underscores the plasticity of literature, the instability of textual history, and the artificiality of the literary canon.