Inquiring into the formation of a literary canon during the Restoration and the eighteenth century, Barbara Benedict poses the question, "Do anthologies reflect or shape contemporary literary taste?" She finds that there was a cultural dialectic at work: miscellanies and anthologies transmitted particular tastes while in turn being influenced by the larger culture they helped to create. Benedict reveals how anthologies of the time often created a consensus of literary and aesthetic values by providing a bridge between the tastes of authors, editors, printers, booksellers, and readers.

Making the Modern Reader, the first full treatment of the early modern anthology, is in part a history of the London printing trade as well as of the professionalization of criticism. Benedict thoroughly documents the historical redefinition of the reader: once a member of a communal literary culture, the reader became private and introspective, morally and culturally shaped by choices in reading. She argues that eighteenth-century collections promised the reader that culture could be acquired through the absorption of literary values. This process of cultural education appealed to a middle class seeking to become discriminating consumers of art.

By addressing this neglected genre, Benedict contributes a new perspective on the tension between popular and high culture, between the common reader and the elite. This book will interest scholars working in cultural studies and those studying noncanonical texts as well as eighteenth-century literature in general.

Read The Book: Making the Modern Reader Online

Full text online, free.

By Barbara M. Benedict. Published by Princeton University Press and copyrighted, © 1996, by Princeton University Press. 

Making the Modern Reader Princeton University Press Official Website

Preface:

Researching another topic in 1988, I stumbled across many books in the British Library featuring snippets of the texts I was seeking. Titled miscellanies, they bore several inviting features. As nonce versions of "fine" literature, they demonstrated the way packaging represents texts for different kinds of readers; as versions of chapbooks, they documented the cultural transmission of literature; and as bundles of literary choices, they promised to shed some light on the way literary hierarchies are shaped. This started me on a hunt for their forebears, during which I have received much help.

For a fellowship in 1993-1994, I thank the National Endowment for the Humanities, and for grants and fellowships I thank the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, the Newberry Library, the Mills Memorial Library, Trinity College, and the St. Anthony's Hall Foundation. My thanks go also to the members of the spring 1994 Eighteenth-Century Workshop at the University of Chicago. I am grateful to the editors of ELH and Eighteenth-Century Life for allowing me to use some material previously published in articles. For energetic encouragement, I am very grateful to J. Paul Hunter and Claude Rawson; my thanks go also to Thomas Bonnell, Richard B. Sher, George A. Starr, Kevin L. Cope, Jim May, Don Farren, Howard Weinbrot, Alden Gordon, Terry Belanger and the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, Margaret Doody, Tony Macro, Margaret J. M. Ezell, Claudia Johnson, Charlotte Stewart-Murphy, Jeffrey H. Kaimowitz, Linda McKinney, and the staff at Trinity College. Mary Murrell at Princeton University Press has been most helpful; the errors in this manuscript are my own.

For a patience that passed understanding a long time ago, and for ceaseless humor, attention, and gentle suggestions, I give my great thanks to my husband, Mark Miller.

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