In recent years, literary criticism has focused ever more systematically on the historical development of the relationship between literary forms of communication and the cultural and political knowledge formations in which they are embedded. As a contribution to this greater trend, this essay attempts to situate the historical origins of a modern concept of literature in early modern Europe and to define its specific function in an epistemological perspective. Pascal's Pensées provide a contemporary heuristic with which the new function of fiction is analyzed, using Cervantes' Don Quijote as a paradigmatic example. Combining key elements from the social history of knowledge, systems theory, and reader-response theory, the essay discusses the methodological problems of conceiving fictionality in ahistoric terms and of attributing a system status to literature. As an alternative to these approaches, it proposes a model of discursive virtualization to describe the changing function of literary communication around 1600.

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Originally printed in the first issue of The British Mercury in 1787, "The Brain-Sucker: Or, the Distress of Authorship" is a piece of satirical short fiction that has so far received only little attention in discussions of eighteenth-century print culture and practices of authorship. Probably written by the Scottish radical John Oswald (c. 1760-1793), "The Brain-Sucker" is told in the form of a letter by a farmer who tells an absent friend about his unfortunate son Dick, whose brain has become infected by poetry. This "disorder" leads Dick to London, where he falls prey to a ruthless publisher, known as "the Brainsucker", who keeps him like a slave in a Grub Street garret. The farmer then travels to London to save his son from the clutches of the Brain-Sucker. We present the text, for the first time, in a critical edition, collated from the three surviving copies, with textual and explanatory notes. In the accompanying essay, we discuss the text's context of origin in late eighteenth-century Grub Street and the cultural implications of its satirical presentation of authorship.

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