Clifford Siskin. The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain 1700-1830.(Book Review)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-SEP-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Boston University

Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Pp. x+285. $41.95 cloth/$16.95 paper.

This is an ambitious and provocative book which asks us not only to rethink the changing history of British writing in relation to labor in the eighteenth century, but also to reflect on current pressures for change in the discipline of "English literature." Faced with our own technological and economic challenges to the study of the book, Siskin reassesses the equally significant changes that writing underwent during the course of the long eighteenth century. He asks us, therefore, to uncover a history of writing that has for so long remained occluded by the history of literature. In a context where writing is once again being made strange by new technologies, Siskin addresses with some urgency the new designations and constitutions of writing that emerged from the late seventeenth century onwards. This is a book which wishes to return writing (and more particularly the narrow definition of "Literature") to the wider scene of disciplinarity, professionalism, and labor.

Siskin's main argument--much repeated and illustrated throughout his book--is that in the wider romantic period a limiting of the idea of the work of writing took place and was conceived as productive of depth. This paradoxical narrative that...

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