Just when the circulating libraries were disillusioning Samuel Taylor Coleridge with the world of novel, and distressing him with the spectacle of the corruption of taste and morals through this kind of entertainment, the newspaper was coming in as the new technological cliché. Lamartine, in 1830, said, "The book arrives too late." The daily newspaper he saw as a new technology, creating a liaison between the public and the writer every twenty-four hours, whereas the book took weeks and months to establish the same relation. The speed with which the printed word now related public and the author turned the author into a corporate one, and this distressed people like John Stewart Mill, Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold, who saw the new situation as tragic. But just when the press had established this new cliché form of corporate perception, the probing scholars were already reaching back to retrieve a mythic, and ...

• nathan
• November 14, 2009
• From Cliche to Archetype
• Page 38
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