8. And/also: Laurel Brake, Print Culture’s Restless Pluralist

Abstract I shall begin with the book and the named author because that form with that authority is where ‘Eng. Lit.’ normally starts, and that is the discourse in which Pater’s Renaissance volume has been primarily circulated. However, I want to register a protest as I commit the act: if I were writing in the discourse of publishing history, I would not begin with the book or the author but with the periodicals in which most of the articles in the book first appeared, their names and those of their editors; the titles of articles, both Pater’s and others in the issue in which his appeared; the formats and characters of the journals; how much they cost and who published them; and whether the articles were anonymous (as most nineteenth-century articles were) or signed.1 Genre may be thought of as always already comparative. The matrix of relations of genres of print comprises print culture. It encourages a critical practice that probes within issues and runs of a single title, and across titles and genres. It is not enough to identify ‘X’ as a novel or fiction by ‘Y’ but as a novel appearing in a named review, in monthly parts, over a time span of nineteen months, and in different miscellanies that made up successive issues.2