The Fatal News: Reading and Information Overload in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature

by Katherine E. Ellison

Overview

What was "information" in the early eighteenth century, and what influence did the emergence of information, as potential physical and psychological threat, have on readers of the period? Recent scholarship in eighteenth-century print culture and in twenty-first-century media studies and theory offers a unique opportunity to reconsider how and why information is figuratively imagined during the eighteenth century as an abstract yet bodily entity that can flood, suffocate, and incapacitate readers. Focusing on 1678 to 1722 -- a period that experienced impressive innovations in communication -- this study reveals that the term "information" undergoes a significant transformation with social, cultural, and literary consequences. By investigating discussions of information and media that are evident in works by literary authors, the author finds that writers like John Bunyan, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, and Daniel Defoe confront the idea of information overload and provide case studies in literacy reform that operate on institutional, generic, and consumer levels. For example, while in Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year information is infectious and citizens depend upon comets and phantoms to construct reader-controlled, decentralized media, in Swift's Tale of a Tub commonplace books and collections demonstrate a new type of organizational, or secretarial, impulse in society.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415867269
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	09/11/2014
Series:	Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
Pages:	168
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: The Idea of Information Overload in the Eighteenth Century 1

Chapter 1 Information ad infinitum: Bunyan's Lessons in Careful Reading in The Pilgrim's Progress 19

Chapter 2 Information as Ambush: Miscommunication and the Post in Behn's The History of the Nun 43

Chapter 3 Suffocation by Information: Collectivity and the Secretary in Swifts A Tale of a Tub 65

Chapter 4 Infectious Information: Signs of Collective Intelligence in Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year 89

Afterword: Toward a Material Poiesis of Information 109

Notes 119

Bibliography 139

Index 149