The Book of Improvement
Media Landscapes in the Global Enlightenment
Rachael King(Author)
Yale University Press
Will be published approx. on 13. April 2027
Book
Hardback
288 pages
978-0-300-28771-4 (ISBN)
Description
How the concept of improvement came to dominate and direct British thinking about social change during the eighteenth century
Improvement had a specific environmental meaning during the eighteenth century, referring primarily to the development of land. Its application, however, grew to encompass almost every arena of social life: agriculture, trade, infrastructure, morality, literature, language, the law, the arts, the sciences, the self. Rather than understanding improvement as a set of ideas, Rachael King shows for the first time how the concept developed in and through new forms of early interactive media, such as before-and-after flaps, printed diaries, and magazines and periodicals.
While we now understand improvement as generally "making things better," the idea played a key role in colonial, racist, sexist, and classist undertakings in the period, as colonized peoples, the enslaved, women, and the working classes were sometimes forcibly "improved." Drawing on extensive archival research and bringing together methodologies of media studies, literary studies, the environmental humanities, and the digital humanities, King shows how certain genres of writing elicit a level of interaction that blurs the boundaries of the book, enabling the transformation of an idea into a cultural keyword.
Improvement had a specific environmental meaning during the eighteenth century, referring primarily to the development of land. Its application, however, grew to encompass almost every arena of social life: agriculture, trade, infrastructure, morality, literature, language, the law, the arts, the sciences, the self. Rather than understanding improvement as a set of ideas, Rachael King shows for the first time how the concept developed in and through new forms of early interactive media, such as before-and-after flaps, printed diaries, and magazines and periodicals.
While we now understand improvement as generally "making things better," the idea played a key role in colonial, racist, sexist, and classist undertakings in the period, as colonized peoples, the enslaved, women, and the working classes were sometimes forcibly "improved." Drawing on extensive archival research and bringing together methodologies of media studies, literary studies, the environmental humanities, and the digital humanities, King shows how certain genres of writing elicit a level of interaction that blurs the boundaries of the book, enabling the transformation of an idea into a cultural keyword.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
42 b-w illus.
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 156 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-300-28771-4 (9780300287714)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Rachael King is associate professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres and editor of After Print: Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Cultures.