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

An original study of debates in the 1790s about the nature and social role of literature.

Paul Keen (Author)

9780521653251, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 November 1999

316 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm, 0.64 kg

"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

This 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.

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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]