제인 오스틴 시대 독서행위의 문화적 조건과 독서담론

The Cultural Condition and Discourse of Reading in Jane Austen"s Time

&nbsp;&nbsp;Many literary historians have pointed out the dichotomy between material and cultural conditions of reading and the contemporary&quot;s popular perception of those conditions in late eighteenth- and late nineteenth England, a dichotomy that often tempts modem researchers to willfully misunderstand contemporary reading practices in their using of partial and selective materials. This study sees, however, this dichotomy as an informing register of what Stanley Aronowitz explains as the way in which "popular cultural images become constitutive of social reality"(21). Though misleading as they often were, the contemporary popular view of reading serves to reveal how various cultural forces worked to create the age&quot;s cultural and literary discourse of reading that was then on its way to refashioning itself.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;By focusing on the three major reading constituents-"the broadening of readership," "the proliferation of popular reading," and "the influence of circular libraries and the new novel genre," this study not only reexamines the conflicting cultural landscapes of reading that Jane Austen&quot;s contemporaries pictured for modem readers, but also seeks to identify the way in which various ideological and cultural apparatus intervened in the formation of those pictures. Although this is not a critical study of Jane Austen&quot;s work, some scenes and characters in Austen&quot;s work, along with some others from a few contemporary works, are briefly discussed to illustrate that literary depictions of reading were a vital part of the discursive field where the new, modern paradigm of reading was forged.