Eighteenth-century satirists designed the pages of their books in notoriously elaborate ways—presenting the reader with footnotes by fictional editors, blank spaces indicating "lost" or "censored" material, and facing-page translations crafted so as to conceal departures from the original. Print, Visuality, and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Satire argues that these typographical experiments reflect the Augustan satirists' ambivalence about their era's ever-more ocular approach to nature, to society, and to literature itself (for increasingly literature was taking the form not of a theatrical performance, or of a manuscript traded between friends, but rather of a printed page, whose meaning could be accessed "only" visually). On the one hand, Pope, Swift, and their contemporaries remained convinced of the ability of their texts to function as a kind of ideal optical instrument, sharpening their readers' vision both physically and morally. On the other hand, they feared the dangers of an overly scrutinizing gaze: such a gaze (whether applied to print or to persons) might all too easily undermine the viewer's natural faculty for candor, sympathy, and—perhaps just as importantly—delight and desire. Wanting to ensure that their printed texts never became either a tool of or target for this kind of dehumanizing visual conduct, the Augustans thus shaped their pages in such a way as to "train" their readers in how to look—to restructure how readers viewed both words and world, and to fashion a mode of vision that was simultaneously scrupulous and self-conscious, skeptical but still open to beauty. More info...
Katherine Mannheimer studies Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, with an emphasis on print culture, book history, and histories of reading. Her published work has focused on such topics as the use of page design in eighteenth-century satire; the ways in which early modern culture understood the relationship between gender and the readerly imagination; the tension between print technologies and pastoralism in John Gay’s poetry; and the markings that Alexander Pope left behind in his personal copy of Ben Jonson’s Works. Her first book, Print, Visuality, and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Satire: "The Scope in Ev’ry Page," argues that the Augustans used typography as a kind of pedagogical tool, training their readers in how to see and read. Her current project examines the ways in which reading is depicted on the late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century stage.
