Fatal News

<p>What was information in the early eighteenth century and what influence did the emergence of information as potential physical and psychological threat have on readers of the period? Recent scholarship in eighteenth-century print culture and in twenty-first-century media studies and theory offers a unique opportunity to reconsider how and why information is figuratively imagined during the eighteenth century as an abstract yet bodily entity that can flood suffocate and incapacitate readers. Focusing on 1678 to 1722 -- a period that experienced impressive innovations in communication -- this study reveals that the term information undergoes a significant transformation with social cultural and literary consequences. By investigating discussions of information and media that are evident in works by literary authors the author finds that writers like John Bunyan Aphra Behn Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe confront the idea of information overload and provide case studies in literacy reform that operate on institutional generic and consumer levels. For example while in Defoe's <em>Journal of the Plague Year</em> information is infectious and citizens depend upon comets and phantoms to construct reader-controlled decentralized media in Swift's <em>Tale of a Tub</em> commonplace books and collections demonstrate a new type of organizational or secretarial impulse in society.</p>