Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century

by Christina Lupton

Overview

How did eighteenth-century readers find and make time to read?

Books have always posed a problem of time for readers. Becoming widely available in the eighteenth century—when working hours increased and lighter and quicker forms of reading (newspapers, magazines, broadsheets) surged in popularity—the material form of the codex book invited readers to situate themselves creatively in time. Drawing on letters, diaries, reading logs, and a range of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novels, Christina Lupton’s Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century concretely describes how book-readers of the past carved up, expanded, and anticipated time.

Placing canonical works by Elizabeth Inchbald, Henry Fielding, Amelia Opie, and Samuel Richardson alongside those of lesser-known authors and readers, Lupton approaches books as objects that are good at attracting particular forms of attention and paths of return. In contrast to the digital interfaces of our own moment and the ephemeral newspapers and pamphlets read in the 1700s, books are rarely seen as shaping or keeping modern time. However, as Lupton demonstrates, books are often put down and picked up, they are leafed through as well as read sequentially, and they are handed on as objects designed to bridge temporal distances. In showing how discourse itself engages with these material practices, Lupton argues that reading is something to be studied textually as well as historically.

Applying modern theorists such as Niklas Luhmann, Bruno Latour, and Bernard Stiegler, Lupton offers a rare phenomenological approach to the study of a concrete historical field. This compelling book stands out for the combination of archival research, smart theoretical inquiry, and autobiographical reflection it brings into play.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421425771
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	08/15/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	216
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Christina Lupton is an associate professor at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: When Do We Read?
The Shortness of Time / The Tense of Reading / Literature as Resistance / The Difference Time Makes / Media History as Literary Method

Chapter One: Time Divided
No Difference / Talbot’s Lack of Time / Breaking the Weekly Round / Some Sunday Readers / Sir Charles Comes and Goes

Chapter Two: Joining Up Time
Rereading for Happiness / Slow Translation / Grenville’s Reading Journals /Lifetimes of Reading

Chapter Three: Other Times
Reading in the Field / Linear and Random Access / Literature and Contingency / Amelia’s Beginning with the End / Sidney Bidulph and the Twice-Told Marriage / The Griffiths’ Marriage by the Book

Chapter Four: Time to Come
Stockpiling / Romantic Media / A Simple Story: Reading Comes Later / Godwin: The Future Is Now / Hardcover Truths / You Can’t Skip Pages

Coda: Academic Time

Notes
Works Cited
Index

What People are Saying About This

Andrew Piper

Readers have for centuries been complaining about a lack of time. But in this theoretically nuanced and archivally rich chronicle of eighteenth-century readers, Lupton shows us how books allow us to remake time in a more mindful and coherent way, where time is broken up but not broken.

Leah Price

We usually think of periodicals as timely, books as timeless. Lupton's richly researched and boldly theorized account turns that assumption on its head, revealing that in the eighteenth century as today, a book was what you plan or at least hope to read, what you curse the news for depriving you of time to read, a space of deferred utopian potential.

Carolyn Steedman

The best of reads awaits—about making time for reading and books making time. Reading delayed, reading deferred, reading in the future, books that are never read and read at the hairdresser’s; books cut up, books abandoned. Wearing its theory and reader-autobiography with elegance and style, this book is also a glorious, elegiac love-song for codex.

Helen Small

Lupton’s account of the personal, social, and political value of everyday time spent with, or wanted for, books draws eighteenth-century readers into company with more modern commentators on the temporality of reading as it makes visible the structures of our work and leisure. This is a clever, intimately intelligent book about everyday reading with much to say also about the value of the humanities and the terms on which we may best look to defend them for the future.

Chad Wellmon

In Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century, Christina Lupton asks a simple and powerful question: When do we read? In this theoretically imaginative and historically grounded book, Lupton lays the groundwork for a phenomenology of reading by showing us how this question about the temporality of reading helps us understand our lives as readers anew.

From the Publisher

In Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century, Christina Lupton asks a simple and powerful question: When do we read? In this theoretically imaginative and historically grounded book, Lupton lays the groundwork for a phenomenology of reading by showing us how this question about the temporality of reading helps us understand our lives as readers anew.
—Chad Wellmon, University of Virginia, author of Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University

We usually think of periodicals as timely, books as timeless. Lupton's richly researched and boldly theorized account turns that assumption on its head, revealing that in the eighteenth century as today, a book was what you plan or at least hope to read, what you curse the news for depriving you of time to read, a space of deferred utopian potential.
—Leah Price, Harvard University, author of How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

Lupton’s account of the personal, social, and political value of everyday time spent with, or wanted for, books draws eighteenth-century readers into company with more modern commentators on the temporality of reading as it makes visible the structures of our work and leisure. This is a clever, intimately intelligent book about everyday reading with much to say also about the value of the humanities and the terms on which we may best look to defend them for the future.
—Helen Small , Oxford University, author of The Value of the Humanities

The best of reads awaits—about making time for reading and books making time. Reading delayed, reading deferred, reading in the future, books that are never read and read at the hairdresser’s; books cut up, books abandoned. Wearing its theory and reader-autobiography with elegance and style, this book is also a glorious, elegiac love-song for codex.
—Carolyn Steedman, University of Warwick, author of An Everyday Life of the English Working Class: Work, Self and Sociability in the Early Nineteenth Century

Readers have for centuries been complaining about a lack of time. But in this theoretically nuanced and archivally rich chronicle of eighteenth-century readers, Lupton shows us how books allow us to remake time in a more mindful and coherent way, where time is broken up but not broken.
—Andrew Piper, McGill University, author of Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age

By challenging our understanding of time, this marvellously innovative study revisits the processes and resistances of past reading. Christina Lupton’s exploration of non-linear engagements with time uses recent critical and communications theory to offer an expansive and ground-breaking study of eighteenth-century reading experiences. Reading history is excitingly advanced and will not be the same again.
—James Raven, University of Essex, author of What is the History of the Book?

James Raven

By challenging our understanding of time, this marvellously innovative study revisits the processes and resistances of past reading. Christina Lupton’s exploration of non-linear engagements with time uses recent critical and communications theory to offer an expansive and ground-breaking study of eighteenth-century reading experiences. Reading history is excitingly advanced and will not be the same again.

Editorial Reviews

What makes Lupton's thoughtful and learned new book, Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century, so interesting... is that she presents a set of exemplary readers and writers whose reflective encounters with books highlight the utility of the codex as a technique for thinking about time in its many meanings. The result is a vigorous and partially novel defense of the value of books and the humanities to a happy and meaningful life... Rather than seeing time as a scarce, homogeneous resource to be economized or optimized, Lupton invites us to follow her in seeing books as things that introduce difference, discontinuity, and even plasticity into time itself.
—David Henkin, Public Books

The big achievement here is to set the book in motion, wrenching it free of its disciplinary moorings and putting it back into the flux and flow of time. Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century is a slim book, but dense, pointing forward itself to future possibilities and new angles on the history of reading.
—Gill Partington, Cambridge University, LA Review of Books

Memoir-like elements give Lupton's book a vivid immediacy rarely achieved in scholarly writing . . . she shows us how reading feels, in both its social and its most deeply personal aspects . . . Her book goes beyond the perennial problem of how, amid life's many distractions, we might carve out time to read. Reading itself, she argues, "makes" time: books allow us to apprehend time as something elusive and elastic, less a resource to be exploited than an experience to be explored.
—David Winters, Times Literary Supplement

The excitement of acquiring concrete, pocketable books in the hope of perhaps someday reading their contents forms in the mind a modest but palpable self who may be permitted by circumstance to do so—a self still waiting in the wings. For them Reading and the Making of Time is written.
—Nan Z. Da, University of Notre Dame, The Hedgehog Review

Christina Lupton's Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century is a fascinating exploration of how books—even those we don't get around to reading—shape our experience of time . . . Lupton's elegant prose render her complex ideas remarkably accessible . . . the book is ideally suited to course syllabi at the graduate and advanced undergraduate levels. Making of Time is certain to leave an impact on eighteenth-century studies, book history, and theories of reading. Moreover, its fresh perspective on the utility of activities generally deemed non-useful make it broadly applicable to other kinds of media studies including film and gaming.
—Matthew Risling, University of Michigan – Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute, Review of English Studies

That Christina Lupton's Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century is best read slowly and carefully testifies to its achievement as both a rigorously researched history and a philosophy of reading for the present . . . For anyone invested in reading books, teaching books, or simply making time for books, Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century is just such a worthwhile commitment.
—Alexander Creighton, Harvard University, Studies in Romanticism

From the Publisher

Memoir-like elements give Lupton's book a vivid immediacy rarely achieved in scholarly writing . . . she shows us how reading feels, in both its social and its most deeply personal aspects . . . Her book goes beyond the perennial problem of how, amid life's many distractions, we might carve out time to read. Reading itself, she argues, "makes" time: books allow us to apprehend time as something elusive and elastic, less a resource to be exploited than an experience to be explored.

Times Literary Supplement - David Winters

The big achievement here is to set the book in motion, wrenching it free of its disciplinary moorings and putting it back into the flux and flow of time. Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century is a slim book, but dense, pointing forward itself to future possibilities and new angles on the history of reading.

LA Review of Books - Gill Partington

The excitement of acquiring concrete, pocketable books in the hope of perhaps someday reading their contents forms in the mind a modest but palpable self who may be permitted by circumstance to do so—a self still waiting in the wings. For them Reading and the Making of Time is written.

The Hedgehog Review - Nan Z. Da

Christina Lupton's Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century is a fascinating exploration of how books—even those we don't get around to reading—shape our experience of time . . . Lupton's elegant prose render her complex ideas remarkably accessible . . . the book is ideally suited to course syllabi at the graduate and advanced undergraduate levels. Making of Time is certain to leave an impact on eighteenth-century studies, book history, and theories of reading. Moreover, its fresh perspective on the utility of activities generally deemed non-useful make it broadly applicable to other kinds of media studies including film and gaming.

Review of English Studies - Matthew Risling

What makes Lupton's thoughtful and learned new book, Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century, so interesting... is that she presents a set of exemplary readers and writers whose reflective encounters with books highlight the utility of the codex as a technique for thinking about time in its many meanings. The result is a vigorous and partially novel defense of the value of books and the humanities to a happy and meaningful life... Rather than seeing time as a scarce, homogeneous resource to be economized or optimized, Lupton invites us to follow her in seeing books as things that introduce difference, discontinuity, and even plasticity into time itself.

Public Books - David Henkin

That Christina Lupton's Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century is best read slowly and carefully testifies to its achievement as both a rigorously researched history and a philosophy of reading for the present . . . For anyone invested in reading books, teaching books, or simply making time for books, Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century is just such a worthwhile commitment.

Studies in Romanticism - Alexander Creighton