College Literature

Recent work in eighteenth-century studies, emblematized by the 2010 This Is Enlightenment edited by William Warner and Clifford Siskin, asserts that analyzing the past through experiences of online media and related social change is not inherently anachronistic but rather enables new means of historicist understanding. Digital innovation has complicated much that seemed integrally stable in twentieth-century culture, literature, and their production, and experience of a digital world grants contemporary scholars fresh access to past transformations, particularly regarding discourse and mediation, both of which changed dramatically in eighteenth-century Britain. Re-reading eighteenth-century writing and its circulation in light of emergent digital culture, Rachael Scarborough King's Writing to the World provides a ground-breaking account of literary development in the long eighteenth century. King moved to academia from an earlier career in journalism, and Writing to the World is undergirded by her knowledge of journalism's recent alterations and concomitant cultural effects.

Writing to the World proposes the concept of the bridge genre: in times of pervasive technological transformation a bridge genre "facilitates change by providing writers and readers with paths across shifting media landscapes . . . they transfer existing textual conventions to emerging modes of composition and circulation" (2). [End Page 172] As such, a bridge genre offers stability as an established yet pliant form operating among broader generic and discursive upheaval. King demonstrates how epistolary writing bridged the development of newspapers, periodicals, biographies, and novels during a "postal era," which she situates between initial English legislation of the post in 1657 and the 1839-1840 broad reform of the British postal system. In this period, the letter both realized and symbolized communication, exemplifying the potential and difficulty of physically conveying ideas and emotions. The letter "served as a metonym for spoken and written interaction in an increasingly mediated world" (6). King reveals how epistolary writing as such aided writers' and readers' negotiation of burgeoning forms of print. The world of King's title refers to a contemporaneous trope for the area within "the reach of the mail" (14). King's demonstration that Britons imagined and mapped the "world" via the circulation of discourse calls for investigation beyond the scope of her study, suggesting possible implications for British imperialism. Indeed, Writing to the World is never just exemplary scholarship regarding eighteenth-century British literature; it opens space for thinking and research well beyond such specialization, as indicated by a postscript extending its core concepts to the German Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1859-1860), Spike Jonze's 2013 film Her, and the current website of The New Yorker. Most importantly, King's concluding "Bibliographical Essay" calls for more research on the intersection of genre and medium. Her own book testifies to the richness of studying their interrelation.

King's first chapter highlights the epistolary organization of early English newspapers—their standard configuration as a series of foreign correspondents' letters printed without alteration. The datelines of these letters persist as conventional to current news reportage. Considering these papers alongside correspondence between Sir William Temple and Dorothy Osborne, John Locke and Cornelius Lyde, and John Dryden and Elizabeth Steward, King explains that epistolarity relieved editors from authorial responsibility yet simultaneously conferred upon individual reports objective and empirical authority. The second chapter shows how early periodicals capitalize on the epistolary composition of newspapers, adding to it a "self-reflexive commentary upon the letters within their pages" (51). Turn of the eighteenth-century periodicals drew readers into their publication by soliciting, printing, and responding to these readers' letters. In the progression from John Dunton's [End Page 173] Athenian Mercury to Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's The Tatler and The Spectator, King traces refinement of the author as a figure linking manuscript's relative privacy to print's publicity. Whereas Dunton's interactions with readers situate all parties on the same level, Addison and Steele assert their "authorial...