Book Review: The Ephemeral Eighteenth Century: Print, Sociability, and the Cultures of Collecting by Gillian Russell

Gillian Russell. The Ephemeral Eighteenth Century: Print, Sociability, and the Cultures of Collecting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xii + 303. £75 (hardcover) / $79.05 (eBook).

Reviewed by: Amelia Dale

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

New historicism asserts an interchangeability between conventional literature and historical document: both are proximately circulating legible texts. Historicist approaches to literature dominate the global academy and the fields of eighteenth-century studies and Romanticism. It is typical, even expected practice for a scholar to read literature alongside a scattering of paper documents pulled from a larger historical mass, a practice facilitated by such documents’ digitization in databases such as Gale’s Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Yet a sustained focus on the proximately—rather than definitively—literary is perhaps more accepted in theory than it is practiced. Receipts and calendars constitute some of the oldest forms of Western print, yet we are not expected to teach their analysis in a literary studies class. Even in research, more often than not, items like book sales catalogues and almanacs listing public figures are instrumentalized to illuminate a more unconditionally literary text, rather than explored as genres of their own.