Infrastructures of Enlightenment: Road- Making, the Circulation of Print, and the Emergence of Literature in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

Between 1720 and 1800, the landscape of England was transformed by the building and improving of roads on an unprecedented scale. As visually articulated by Eric Pawson's maps, the result was simultaneously an apparent fragmentation--a landscape literally divided by administrative units called turnpike trusts--and a new unification--the linking together of parts into a new national whole. This dissertation examines this material and conceptual event of "unification" through "fragmentation" in relation to the making of roads and the emergence of Literature in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. My argument is that the arrangement of those parts and wholes was not only geographical: the circulation of individuals, commodities, and information through new channels of communication and exchange, particularly the literary, brought about new kinds of individuals for a new kind of society. Turning from essays to novels and from newspapers to verse, I detail how emerging forms of print and knowledge figured in the making of roads, identities, and nationhood--what I term "infrastructures of Enlightenment"--by introducing new ways of identifying with others by identifying with texts. This dissertation, then, brings to bear on literary studies the topographical and geographical transformation of the English landscape in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By locating the modern category of Literature within the conceptual and practical changes in the function of writing in the British eighteenth century--changes concerned with the ability to access ever wider regions and ever deeper recesses of the individual--this dissertation discusses the historical conditions of possibility for modern canonicity. When certain kinds of writing began to be addressed to the pleasures of readers, and when that mode of address was classified as either "improving" or "disordering," crucial conditions of possibility are in place for the establishing of canons of reading capable of improving readers and fortifying them against, as Clara Reeve put it, the "Chaos of the Circulating Libraries."