Writing Practice and Creation of New Literary Genres

The Spectator (1711- 1712) and the World Wide Web

Abstract

For two decades, Brazilian literary history has investigated 19th-century newspapers as both an object and a source of research, grounded in the principles of Cultural History, which understand the circulation of literary writing through the practices of reading communities (Chartier, 1998). Thérenty and Vaillant (2011 apud Granja, 2018) label the transformation that began in 1836 with the commercial expansion of the newspaper La Presse as the “media age”, comparing that moment to the revolution in writing practices triggered by the Internet. This revolution, however, had been building since the 18th century, stemming from changes implemented by the English periodical The Spectator (1711-1712). This publication introduced writing practices very similar to those currently used on the Internet, which persisted throughout the 18th century and reached their peak in the 19th century in France, as well as in several countries across Europe and the Americas, including Brazil.