The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700-1830

The Work of Writing is a deeply mature piece of scholarship involving dozens upon dozens of authors from all over the long eighteenth century. Not only is its sense of the 'textual' very broad, ranging from literature, to philosophy (which, Siskin argues, once occupied the disciplinary space that Literature does today), to economics and sociology, but in requiring that we wake up and think about enlightenment processes of cultural formation, it is itself exemplary of that process. Thinking very hard and on every page, it passes its own test in an exhilarating manner. -- Stuart Curran, University of Pennsylvania The Work of Writing establishes Cliff Siskin as one of our most subtle and theoretically sophisticated scholars of Romantic cultural studies and the New Historicism. This book, breath-taking in its range, documents the growing professionalisation of writing in England in the eighteenth-century, as well as the ways in which both nationalist and entrepreneurial impulses worked to exclude women writers from the new category of 'professional writer' in the nineteenth century. -- Anne K. Mellor, University of California, Los Angeles In an enterprise strikingly termed 'dedisciplinary, ' Clifford Siskin's book undertakes a daring fusion of literary and social theory. Drawing with remarkable breadth on scholarship in history and in the social sciences, Prof. Siskin aims not just to understand a group of literary texts, but to rethink on a historical basis the whole concept of literature. Meticulously detailed and closely argued in its attention to a large range of major and minor writers, to questions of the public, the nation, gender, and genre, it has had animmediate impact on Romantic studies and is essential reading for any scholar wishing to know what matters in the field today. -- Marshall Brown, University of Washington This book has an audaciously grand sweep to it-Siskin appears to have read everything composed between the Re