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In this ambitious work, Collin Jennings applies computational methods to eighteenth-century fiction, history, and poetry to reveal the nonlinear courses of reading they produce. Hallmark genres of the British Enlightenment, such as the novel and the stadial history, are typically viewed as narratives of linear progress, emerging from Britain's imperial growth and scientific advancement. Jennings foregrounds Enlightenment links: the paratextual devices, including cross-references, footnotes, and epigraphs, that make words work differently by pointing the reader to places inside and outside the text. Writers and printers combined text and paratext to produce nonlinear paths of reading and polysemous forms of reference that resist simple, causal structures of experience or theories of mind. Alexander Pope, Adam Smith, Ann Radcliffe, and other writers developed genres that operate diagrammatically, with different points of entry and varied relationships between the language and format of books.
Revealing the eighteenth-century genealogy of the digital hyperlinks of today, Enlightenment Links argues that emergent print genres combined language and links to bring forward the associative, circular, and multi-sequential ways in which literature makes language work.
"This study breaks new ground with respect to what we know about the organization of knowledge in the British Enlightenment. Jennings provocatively inverts his historical texts in order to read them as engaging with our current technologies of AI." —Peter de Bolla, University of Cambridge
"Enlightenment Links charts a course 'linking' the 21st and 18th centuries that provides sufficiently deep matter for sustained rumination. Recommended." —A. W. Lee, CHOICE
"Enlightenment Links is an impressive book. Like its source material, it moves between specific concrete instances and larger, more abstract concepts. In doing so, Collins shows how Enlightenment links served not only to connect texts, but to connect those texts to the world." —Jason Gulya, H-Albion
"Jennings's work in digital humanities lends further support to the idea that computational models of linkage offer new ways to visualize and understand eighteenth-century knowledge systems. His chapter on epigraphs in novels of the late eighteenth century is an essential contribution to understanding this particular paratext." —Laura Miller, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
"Each of the four central chapters of this fascinating study focuses on a particular paratextual device, considered in relation to a different eighteenth-century printed genre." —David Palfrey, Jahrbuch für Kommunikationsgeschichte
"This book represents an important synthesis of Enlightenment studies with media history and the history of the book.... It demonstrates very effectively what these methods are capable of in the hands of an experienced researcher, while giving [Digital Humanities] novices useful points of entry into its varied techniques." —David Mazella, Textual Cultures
Introduction: What's in a Link?
1. Cross-References: Shapes of Knowledge in Chambers's Cyclopaedia
2. Footnotes: The Poetics of Progress
3. Indexes: Techniques of Abstraction in the Scottish Philosophical History
4. Epigraphs: Paratextual Spaces in Novels of the 1790s
Conclusion: The Future of Links
Appendix: Data and Methods
Notes
Bibliography
Index