Amelia Dale
The Printed Reader: Gender, Quixotism, and Textual Bodies in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Shortlisted for the 2021 BARS First Book Prize (British Association for Romantic Studies)
Bucknell University Press, 2019
The Printed Reader explores the transformative power of reading in the eighteenth century, and how this was expressed in the fascination with Don Quixote and in a proliferation of narratives about quixotic readers, readers who attempt to reproduce and embody their readings.
Through intersecting readings of quixotic narratives, including work by Charlotte Lennox, Laurence Sterne, George Colman, Richard Graves, and Elizabeth Hamilton, Amelia Dale argues that literature was envisaged as imprinting-most crucially, in gendered terms-the reader’s mind, character, and body.
The Printed Reader brings together key debates concerning quixotic narratives, print culture, sensibility, empiricism, book history, and the material text, connecting developments in print technology to gendered conceptualizations of quixotism.
Tracing the meanings of quixotic readers’ bodies, The Printed Reader claims the social and political text that is the quixotic reader is structured by the experiential, affective, and sexual resonances of imprinting and impressions.
About the Author
Dr Amelia Dale is a Lecturer in English at the Australian National University. She has held positions at Nanjing University, SUIBE and the University of Sydney, where she received her PhD in eighteenth-century literature. Her research centres on eighteenth-century and Romantic literature and culture, with particular interests in book history, gender and genre, and histories of the body. Her monograph, The Printed Reader: Gender, Quixotism, and Textual Bodies in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Bucknell University Press, 2019), examines British adaptations of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote to argue that literature was envisaged as imprinting the reader’s mind, character, and body in gendered ways. It was short-listed for the British Association of Romanticism’s First Book Prize. Recent work includes a large collaborative project with Dr Nicola Parsons (University of Sydney) on the long-running catalogue of London sex workers, Harris's List of Covent-Garden Ladies (1760-1794). Dr Dale is editor of the academic journal The Shandean and interviews editor for the poetry journal Rabbit. Her work has been supported by the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the ARC Centre for Excellence for the History of Emotions, Yale University Lewis Walpole Library and Chawton House.
