The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [44]
Some genres that have become central to a contemporary understanding of literature, like the novel, were down-market upstarts until fairly recently in modern Western history. The word novel began to appear consistently in the 1680s, replacing or competing with romance; both terms are used throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as what had once been trivial became literature, an instrument of national pride, identification, and cultural advocacy. The study of literature, together with that of the sciences, gained an important place in public culture, and fictions of the self, the individual, and the bildungsroman or novel of personal development, became an influential, as well as a well-regarded, mode of literary writing. This kind of prose fiction differed from the old ideal of the national epic in verse, though—as many critics have noted—it shared some of its goals and techniques. Much more could be said on this topic, about which there exists an extensive and informative body of critical history.10
But the point here is straightforward: with the novel, as with the drama, the lyric poem, the satire—indeed, just about every genre we think of as foundational to the notion of literature—we are dealing with a form that has evolved over time, that had some antecedents that were distinctly low, popular, and unrespectable, and in short, became literature, for reasons variously aesthetic, political, situational, and cultural. The establishment of a literary canon requires both the forgetting and the selective remembering of these sometimes low origins.
“Baggage Books,” Ephemera, and the Ballad
It’s not a surprise that texts first regarded as extra-literary should be brought, after the fact, into the canonical fold. Ben Jonson scandalized some of his contemporaries by publishing his plays in folio form in 1612. The publication of Shakespeare’s plays in folio eleven years later was a similar act of confidence, or bravery, on the part of his friends. Playbooks were not works, a term of honor reserved for sermons, didactic writings, and other serious endeavors. And the large folio format was reserved for writings of enduring importance, the opposite of stage plays. Sir Thomas Bodley, the founder of Oxford’s Bodleian library, instructed his librarian not to include any plays, which he called “riffe raffes” and “baggage bookes.”11 Such things could create a scandal. In any case, plays were comparable, he thought, to items like almanacs and proclamations, useful written objects that, once used, could be thrown away.
The technical term for throwaways of this kind is ephemera, from a word meaning “lasting only a day.” In general, the word refers to items like posters, greeting cards, seed packets, advertising mailers, air transport labels, printed handouts, and probably everything we now call second-class mail. Perhaps inevitably, ephemera have now become collectibles, highly valued by museums, galleries, auction houses, and libraries. What was once discarded is now purchased, donated, preserved, cataloged, and exhibited. The Ephemera Society of America, formed in 1980, encourages “interest in ephemera and the history identified with it” and publishes The Ephemera Journal; a recent issue contained articles on “an important collection of paper ephemera with Shakespearean themes” at the Folger Shakespeare Library; a collection of antiquarian playing cards from the Netherlands that had second lives as “promissory notes, clothing reinforcement, and even heart-wrenching notes from destitute mothers forced to abandon their infants”; and nineteenth-century scrapbooks.12 There are ephemera collections at the British Library and the National Library of Australia, and an Ephemera Society in New Zealand, as well as archives of video and audio ephemera. Bearing