| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
|
|
means for fulfilling the linguistic power exchanges found commonly in spoken discourse.1 Inventions such as Friedrich Gottlob Koenig and Andreas Friedrich Bauer's high-speed printing press enabled mass production and low-cost readership among the working class, who experienced literacy on multiple levels: to educate themselves, to experience leisure and diversion, to confirm their religious beliefs, and to improve their labor skills. Much in the same ways that speech had been used to affirm intersubjectivity, print culture conditioned readers to accept the unidirectional exchange of values and interests that would create a community of readers who would be responsive to the expansion of a new technical society and would eventually perform the routines of mechanized labor. Rather than merely romanticizing pretechnological cultures, I wish to suggest that the emergence of technologies of production and print culture within the early to mid-Victorian periods precipitated the diminution of linguistic exchanges as techné or modes of revealing and critiquing transferences of power and also for rivaling print culture's representational claims of how linguistic exchanges had been conceptualized and experienced.
The diffusion of print culture emphasized the “distinct advantage of writing” for mass production and dissemination. The implementation of new technologies made literacy an essential component of economic growth and was instrumental “in the making [of] a sophisticated work force that could understand and manage the new machinery and its operatives” (“Idea of Literacy”). During the early to mid-Victorian periods, industrial novels assumed the position of superiority in unacknowledged and unequal power exchanges with the reader as its “non-contradictory subject” (Belsey 60).2 Novelists legitimized and authenticated narrative voice as a strategy for managing nineteenth-century dissatisfaction with fictional representations of linguistic power exchanges.