Thursday, 22 March, 4:15 p.m.
Victoria College, 91 Charles Street West, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Alumni Hall, Old Vic 112

In Association with the Friends of the Victoria College Library
Refreshments will be served after the talk

Early nineteenth-century literary culture in Britain depended to a
remarkable extent on readers' practices of excerpting, clipping, and
pasting, and redrafting, recontextualizing, and recycling: practices
that would seem alien to literate individuals' standard definitions of
the act of reading, except that recently our interactions with the
reading materials of the Internet have made them newly familiar. To
ponder the historical changeability of our definitions of literary
appreciation, this paper surveys the scrapbooks created by
leisure-class girls and women: a collection of hand-made, personalized
anthologies of quotable quotes, riddles, and poetic beauties, which
also functioned as an exhibition-space for polite female
accomplishments such as botanizing, flower-painting, and
fern-pressing. In the context defined by early-nineteenth-century
women's scrap-booking, the retranscription of literary texts to fit
new contexts was an important part of the reading process: that these
readers read with pencil and scissors at hand challenges historicist
accounts of reading as acculturation. In this context, too, literary
appreciation was a forum for sociability and social rivalry, in ways
that challenge accounts of reading as a solitary, private process.
“Recycled Paper” also looks to these scrap-books for how they might
illuminate the love of literature: the labours with pen, paintbrush,
scissors, and paste that created these albums also converted books by
authors into love tokens to authors--votive offerings to a canon of
authorial saints.

Deidre Lynch is Chancellor Jackman Professor of the Arts and an
associate professor in the Department of English. With the support of
fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the
National Humanities Center (in the United States) and, most recently,
the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, she has published
widely on the theory and history of the novel and on the literature,
information cultures, and book history of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century Britain. She is the author of The Economy of
Character: Novels, Market Culture and the Business of Inner Meaning
(1998; winner of the 1999 Modern Language Association Prize for a
First Book): a study that treats the “inward” turn of the novel and
the attendant “rounding” of novelistic character as events in the
history of reading and the history of consumer society. Her other
books include (as co-editor, with William B. Warner) Cultural
Institutions of the Novel (1996) and (as editor) Janeites: Austen’s
Disciples and Devotees. She is a contributor to the Cambridge
Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period, the Cambridge History of
English Romantic Literature, the Cambridge Companion to Daniel Defoe,
the Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, the Blackwell Companion to
Jane Austen, and many other anthologies and handbooks.  Professor
Lynch is also active as an editor and anthologist, having prepared
editions of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(a Norton Critical Edition, 2009), Jane Austen’s Persuasion (Oxford
World’s Classics, 2004), and, with Jack Stillinger, the
Romantic-period volume of The Norton Anthology of English Literature
(2006). She is currently completing At Home in English: A Cultural
History of the Love of Literature, which engages the eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century prehistory of English studies in order to give a
new account of the state of the discipline and the state of our
literary affections. This book sets out to bring poetics, book
history, and the history of aesthetics together with the histories of
psychology, sexuality, and the family, in order to trace the
particular redefinitions of literary experience – and of the interior
spaces of the mind and home – that had to occur in order for the love
of literature to become part of English studies’ “normal science.”