“Cool” Reading: Bagehot, the Book Review, and the Fiction of Literary Knowledge

Abstract:This article situates Walter Bagehot’s reviews in the history of modern knowledge provided by Alan Liu’s The Laws of Cool. I suggest this epistemic disposition emerges in the 1860s as book reviews transition from summary arbiters of taste into new knowledge. Bagehot’s essays are technically reviews, occasioned by biographies, editions, and scholarly books about authors. Yet Bagehot subordinates the books under review to promote his own thesis. Insofar as they deviate from generic nineteenth-century reviews, Bagehot’s essays reveal the emergence of “literary knowledge”—a form of knowledge abstracted from and about a literary text but not just a biographical or historical contextualization of it.