Cryptogrammatophoria: The Romance and Novelty of Losing Readers in Code
Katherine Ellison, Illinois State University
Volume 20, no. 3, Spring 2008
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
The seventeenth-century English cryptography manual is part of the mid- to late seventeenth-century negotiation with the formal conventions of fiction. The manuals mediate between the conventions of romance fiction, with its depiction of exotic tales from the distant past and aristocratic ideology, and the self-reflexive critique of that idealized history that would characterize the later novel. They also stage reading as a continuously negotiable contract between writer and reader, who work both together and against one another to define what is true or not true. Their narratives capitalize on the potential of print to resist closure and destabilize the historicized ideologies of the romance, in the end leaving readers at an epistemological dead end, suspicious of writing’s ability to ever communicate truth. Situated self-consciously between fiction as it was identified with romance and the emerging empirical and self-critical narrative of the early novel, the cryptography manual exemplifies the ways in which unreadability would become “central to the contemporary experience of literature.”
Other ECF articles on the topics of secrets and codes include:
Out of Egypt and into England: Secrecy and the State in Samuel Pratt’s Family Secrets
by JAMES CRUISE (ECF 22.2, Winter 2009-10)
The Hidden Life of Porcelainiers in Eighteenth-Century France
by CHRISTINE A. JONES (ECF 23.2, Winter 2010-11)
Literary Gossip: Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon and the roman à clef
by LAUREN McCOY (ECF 27.1, Fall 2014)
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