Fugitive knowledge: romantic compilation and the materials of method

Brooker, Marianne (2021) Fugitive knowledge: romantic compilation and the materials of method. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

This thesis explores the relationship between materials described as ‘fugitive’ in the Romantic period, and the methods by which these materials were arranged, displayed and preserved. It situates the organisation of knowledge within specific domains of practice, reading across alternative models of disciplinary mapping and composite organisational genres such as encyclopaedias, poetry collections, bookkeeping ledgers, colour charts, albums of newspaper clippings, and museum descriptions. In each case, fugitive knowledge is produced through an interplay between loose, ephemeral or otherwise volatile materials and the methods devised to bring them into order. This thesis is divided into four chapters that each adopt the nomenclature of early nineteenth-century fugitive forms to explore compilation across and between disciplines: volatilia (the flying leaves of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s notebooks and his manuscript plans for encyclopaedias); inserenda (Jeremy Bentham’s storehouse of manuscripts, waste-books, and paper tables and trees); materia pictoria (pigments, paper tools, and books of colour theory); and spolia (John Soane’s architectural and manuscript fragments, and albums of clippings). Fugitive knowledge articulates the tension between scraps, books, and systems, and locates meaning in the contingent juxtapositions of compilation.

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