Practice question · Put in order
Arrange the media of literary transmission in historical order.
- Manuscript copying by hand
- Digital circulation
- Printing with movable type in Europe
- Oral composition and performance
- Industrial printing and mass literacy
Hints
- Start with the technology that needs no surface at all.
- Movable type reaches Europe in the 1450s; mass literacy is a nineteenth-century phenomenon.
Show the answer
- Oral composition and performance
- Manuscript copying by hand
- Printing with movable type in Europe
- Industrial printing and mass literacy
- Digital circulation
Why
Each stage changes what can be written, not merely how it travels. Oral composition needs formulae; manuscript culture makes every copy a variant; print stabilises the text and makes the author's name a commercial asset; mass literacy creates the serialised novel; digital circulation makes the text fluid again.
Practise Literary Study Among the Disciplines
The app has 3 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Literature I is free to start.
More questions on Literary Study Among the Disciplines
- Eagleton argues literature is a functional rather than an ontological category. What follows from that claim?
- For roughly ninety-five per cent of the time humans have had language, there was no writing.
- Sort each claim by whether it belongs to the OLD sense of "literature" (learning in general) or the MODERN…
- Complete the account of the category.
- Milman Parry argued that Homeric epithets such as "swift-footed Achilles" are metrical building blocks. If a…
- Match each writer to the argument they made about the category of literature.
- Raymond Williams shows that the modern sense of 'literature' narrowed to imaginative art around 1800. What…
- Print culture made the author's name more commercially important than manuscript culture had.