About the Book:This book examines four seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers concerned with the ways in which the commercial print trade was transforming traditional models of literary authority and immortality. While all were excited by the memorial potential of the printed book, they also betray a profound anxiety about how the new conditions of authorship would effect the transmission of cultural memory, and their ability to participate in and even control that process. This study contributes to the current pursuit-in both literary studies and the social sciences-of histories of memory in Western culture, employing current scholarship from the social and natural sciences to delineate the nature of modern memory.