ABSTRACT
We often associate the book with a forward progression through time – the time it takes to read, overlaid with narrative time – and space – the physical spaces of the book, via the turning of pages. However, as Jeffrey Masten, Peter Stallybrass, and Nancy Vickers observe, such a conception of the book promotes ‘the myth that “the book,” as a technological form, is organized so as to be read frompage 1topage 2, frompage 2topage 3, and so on to the end of the book’. While this is ‘a possible way of reading a book, and one that was encouraged by the development of narrative fiction in the eighteenth century’, for Masten et al. this sort of continuous reading experience is more characteristic of an earlier written form: the scroll is ‘a technology that depends upon a literal unwinding in which the physical proximity of one moment in the narrative to another is both materially and symbolically significant’. While the conventional printed book ‘denies us a transcendent simultaneity’, as Susan Stewart says, ‘in the way it is bound’, the scroll presents its content in a simultaneous material form. 1 Perhaps by association this formal configuration, which like all book formats is a spatial one, also offers a different model of textual structure and time.
