"But to Return": Mary Rowlandson, Ruminative Reading, and the Book Object

Matthew P. Brown

This talk focuses on the book format - in its metrics of space, time, and volume - as a means to consider readership history. Recent research has pressed scholars to consider the codex as nurturing discontinuous reading habits. My paper contextualizes nonlinear reading in terms of devotional and Enlightenment attitudes to the practice. From the devotional perspective, the reading practices enacted by Mary Rowlandson in her captivity suggest that the book format is a compendium of fragments providing solace and admonition. Her narrative alludes to what I have called a "phenomenology of the book" for the period, by which I mean the way the codex organizes time and space for its reader. Emphasizing the spatial properties of books, I will look at exemplary moments of ruminative stasis for author and reader, moments that redound as well to the temporal movement of the narrative. I then turn to another quality of format - the volume of a book - to consider ways of treating the cultural meanings of a codex's three dimensionality, or its thingness, if you will, in light of Rowlandson's narrative. I conclude by gesturing to how matters of fragmentary reading, spatial topoi, and book volume might shed light on the status of academic writing and publishing in our current situation as humanities scholars.