MEN OF GENIUS

In my Introduction I said that, whether they were sympathetic to the idea or not, most people who thought about it at all considered literature to be the basis of an information revolution with farreaching political consequences. They may have embraced its promise or denounced its threat, but from Thomas Hardy to William Godwin to John Robison to T. J. Mathias to John Bowles, they identified literature as an ‘engine’ of change. I emphasized that the reformist argument that these changes would be progressive was a popular but highly contested idea that became increasingly difficult to defend as the political thermometer rose, and that subaltern counterpublics often served as lightning-rods for these anxieties precisely because they reproduced established ideas about the power of print as accurately as they did. I also suggested that some people had begun to insist on an alternative equation of literature with poetry, or more broadly, with ‘creative writing’, which highlighted the importance of the imagination rather than reason, and which tended to be described in a language that stressed the primacy of feelings rather than of scientific or philosophical debates.