The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere

by Paul Keen

Overview

This book offers an original study of debates that arose in the 1790s about the nature and social role of literature and the new class of readers produced by the revolution in information and literacy in eighteenth-century England. The first part 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 and radical women authors, and examines the growth of a Romantic ideology within this context of political and cultural turmoil.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521653251
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	11/28/1999
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Romanticism , #36
Pages:	316
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.87(d)
Lexile:	1790L (what's this?)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements; Introduction: problems now and then; Part I. Enlightenment: 1. The republic of letters; 2. Men of letters; Part II. Marginalia: Preamble: Swinish multitudes; 3. The poorer sort; 4. Masculine women; 5. Oriental literature; Conclusion: romantic revisions; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"As is, the book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Romantic notions of print culture and the public sphere, and cogently works through the ways in which such assumptions impinged upon, and were challenged by, the full range of writers seeking recognition within that prevailing cultural fantasy, the Republic of Letters." Wordsworth Circle

From the Publisher