The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public SphereThis book offers an original study of the debates which arose in the 1790s about the nature and social role of literature. Paul Keen shows how these debates were situated at the intersection of the French Revolution and a more gradual revolution in information and literacy reflecting the aspirations of the professional classes in eighteenth-century England. He shows these movements converging in hostility to a new class of readers, whom critics saw as dangerously subject to the effects of seditious writings or the vagaries of literary fashion. The first part of the book concentrates on the dominant arguments about the role of literature and the status of the author; the second shifts its focus to the debates about working-class activists, radical women authors, and the Orientalists, and examines the growth of a Romantic ideology within this context of political and cultural turmoil. |
Other editions - View all
The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere Paul Keen Limited preview - 1999 |
The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere Paul Keen No preview available - 2006 |
The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere Paul Keen No preview available - 1999 |
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Analytical Review argued argument authors bourgeois British Critic Burke Catherine Macaulay century claims classical republicanism debates diffusion of knowledge discourse distinction E. P. Thompson educational eighteenth eighteenth-century emphasis English Studies Enlightenment Erskine female feminine focus gender Gentleman's Godwin Habermas Hays History human ibid ideal ideas about literature imperial importance individual insisted intellectual John Thelwall journals Klancher labour Lackington language learning liberal liberty libraries litera literary London London Corresponding Society lower orders Macaulay manly Mary Wollstonecraft masculine ment middle-class mind Monthly Review moral nation nature novel opinion Oriental pamphlet period philosophers Poet poetry political print culture professional public sphere radical readers reading public reason reflected reform reformist reinforced republic of letters republicanism Revolution Rights role Romantic Romanticism seditious sense social society sort spirit suggested texts Thelwall Thomas Spence truth ture University Press virtue William William Wordsworth Wollstonecraft women Wordsworth writing