Back to the future: forward to the past?
Blogging about books can seem quite an incongruous activity – like talking about music or dancing about architecture, perhaps. A new, rapid, provisional medium meets an old, revered, established one. But many of the great works of literature weren’t published as books in the first place: some, like Homer, began as oral poetry; others started their life on the stage; and many first appeared in magazines, periodicals, or newspapers. Dickens’ novels, for example, were published section by section in places like All the Year Round, and crowds gathered in Liverpool to await ships delivering the latest instalments of his works.
Modern technology offers us new ways of reading – e-readers allow people to go on holiday with their whole library; apps offer interactive, collaborative experiences. It also, perhaps, gives us a chance to rediscover some of the old ways of encountering texts. Sites like Journal Lists allow you to sign up to receive instalments of works by Dickens, John Clare, and Addison, for example, in the same frequency as their original readers. You can be emailed a couple of chapters a week of Hard Times, for example, and see whether the experience of reading it in this way alters your perception of the work. On sites like modjourn.org, you can find pdfs of the magazines in which modernist poems and short stories were first published, and it’s fascinating to read them alongside each other and alongside the advertising and journalism of the time. Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’ and Yeats’ ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’, both now considered classics, first appeared in the very same issue of The English Review, for example, where they were cheek by jowl with advertisements for Tatcho hair growth, military jewellery, and the League of Nations pride essay. And the British Library offers facsimiles of texts through the ages, presented interactively on screen, giving a vastly different experience from the stultifying, hushed reverence implied by imprints like Penguin Classics.
Modern technology offers us new ways of reading – e-readers allow people to go on holiday with their whole library; apps offer interactive, collaborative experiences. It also, perhaps, gives us a chance to rediscover some of the old ways of encountering texts. Sites like Journal Lists allow you to sign up to receive instalments of works by Dickens, John Clare, and Addison, for example, in the same frequency as their original readers. You can be emailed a couple of chapters a week of Hard Times, for example, and see whether the experience of reading it in this way alters your perception of the work. On sites like modjourn.org, you can find pdfs of the magazines in which modernist poems and short stories were first published, and it’s fascinating to read them alongside each other and alongside the advertising and journalism of the time. Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’ and Yeats’ ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’, both now considered classics, first appeared in the very same issue of The English Review, for example, where they were cheek by jowl with advertisements for Tatcho hair growth, military jewellery, and the League of Nations pride essay. And the British Library offers facsimiles of texts through the ages, presented interactively on screen, giving a vastly different experience from the stultifying, hushed reverence implied by imprints like Penguin Classics.
Try reading a book you know, or have studied, in a different format. How does it alter your experience of the work? How does it make you rethink your understanding of its concerns, its context and its texture?
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