A01=Katherine E. Ellison
Author_Katherine E. Ellison
Category=DSB
celestial
Celestial City
Christians Journey
city
cognitive effects of reading overload
defoes
Defoes Journal
Doubting Castle
Due Preparations
early modern communication
Eighteenth Century Publication
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Fatal News
foes
Follow
Ian Miles
information dissemination
Information Multiplicity
Information Overload
Interpreters House
Irreversible Model
journal
literacy reform history
media theory eighteenth century
narrator
Narrators Anxieties
Nication Systems
Night Watchman
pilgrim
pilgrims
Pilgrims Progress
Plague's Approach
Plague’s Approach
Portrait Of A Man
print culture studies
Private Courier
progress
secrecy in literature
swifts
Swifts Narrator
Town Discourse
Virus's Apparent Movement
Virus’s Apparent Movement
Word Of Mouth
Young Man
Product details
- ISBN 9780415976268
- Weight: 362g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 28 Nov 2005
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
