Reading It Wrong
An Alternative History of Early Eighteenth-Century Literature
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- 20,99 €
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- 20,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
How eighteenth-century literature depended on misinterpretation—and how this still shapes the way we read
Reading It Wrong is a new history of eighteenth-century English literature that explores what has been everywhere evident but rarely talked about: the misunderstanding, muddle and confusion of readers of the past when they first met the uniquely elusive writings of the period. Abigail Williams uses the marginal marks and jottings of these readers to show that flawed interpretation has its own history—and its own important role to play—in understanding how, why and what we read.
Focussing on the first half of the eighteenth century, the golden age of satire, Reading It Wrong tells how a combination of changing readerships and fantastically tricky literature created the perfect grounds for puzzlement and partial comprehension. Through the lens of a history of imperfect reading, we see that many of the period’s major works—by writers including Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Mary Wortley Montagu, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift—both generated and depended upon widespread misreading. Being foxed by a satire, coded fiction or allegory was, like Wordle or the cryptic crossword, a form of entertainment, and perhaps a group sport. Rather than worrying that we don’t have all the answers, we should instead recognize the cultural importance of not knowing.
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"Much of the literature of the early eighteenth century created, depended upon, and suffered from acts of imperfect reading and interpretative confusion," according to this sharp study. Williams (The Social Life of Books), an English professor at the University of Oxford, suggests that rising literacy rates in England and the print industry's move away from "aristocratic patronage" to a more decentralized model generated opportunities for confusion among the country's readers. Highlighting authors' lack of control over how their work was read, Williams notes that novelist Daniel Defoe faced seditious libel charges after publishing a satirical pamphlet skewering Queen Anne's religious intolerance by writing from the perspective of a zealot calling for the execution of those who didn't belong to the Church of England, a stance that was taken at face value by his critics. Williams also explores how different audiences made sense of coded works, noting that Tory journalist Delariviere Manley's The New Atalantis, an exposé of Whig impropriety, was enjoyed by some readers for its titillating tales while others bought literary "keys" that disclosed the real-life aristocrats behind the pseudonymous characters. The thorough research—drawn largely from margin annotations, letters, and journals—impresses, illuminating the dynamic ways an expanding readership made sense of Augustan literature. English scholars will find much to ponder.
