Institutions of Literature, 1700–1900

This lively collection makes a compelling case for the importance of institutions in the production, reception, and meaning of literature.

This collection provides a lively understanding of the roles institutions play in the production and reception of literature, arguing against the assumption that the institutional and the literary are necessarily at odds and demonstrating the particular importance of the period 1700–1900 to the development of the modern institutional landscape.This collection provides students and researchers with a new and lively understanding of the role of institutions in the production, reception, and meaning of literature in the period 1700–1900. The period saw a fundamental transition from a patronage system to a marketplace in which institutions played an important mediating role between writers and readers, a shift with consequences that continue to resonate today. Often producers themselves, institutions processed and claimed authority over a variety of cultural domains that never simply tessellated into any unified system. The collection's primary concerns are British and imperial environments, with a comparative German case study, but it offers encouragement for its approaches to be taken up in a variety of other cultural contexts. From the Post Office to museums, from bricks and mortar to less tangible institutions like authorship and genre, this collection opens up a new field for literary studies.