What is the role of literary writing in democratic society?
Building upon his previous work on the emergence of "literature," Trevor Ross offers a history of how the public function of literature changed as a result of developing press freedoms during the period from 1760 to 1810. Writing in Public examines the laws of copyright, defamation, and seditious libel to show what happened to literary writing once certain forms of discourse came to be perceived as public and entitled to freedom from state or private control.
Ross argues that--with liberty of expression becoming entrenched as a national value--the legal constraints on speech had to be reconceived, becoming less a set of prohibitions on its content than an arrangement for managing the public sphere. The public was free to speak on any subject, but its speech, jurists believed, had to follow certain ground rules, as formalized in laws aimed at limiting private ownership of culturally significant works, maintaining civility in public discourse, and safeguarding public deliberation from the coercions of propaganda. For speech to be truly free, however, there had to be an enabling exception to the rules.
Since the late eighteenth century, Ross suggests, the role of this exception has been performed by the idea of literature. Literature is valued as the form of expression that, in allowing us to say anything and in any form, attests to our liberty. Yet, paradoxically, it is only by occupying no definable place within the public sphere that literature can remain as indeterminate as the public whose self-reinvention it serves.
Описание: The British state between the mid-seventeenth century to the early twentieth century, was essentially a Christian state, in which Christianity permeated all aspects of society. This book brings together a distinguished team of authors who explore the interactions of religion, politics and culture that shaped and defined modern Britain.
Описание: This edited collection, a tribute to the late noted eighteenth-century scholar Betty Rizzo, testifies to her influence as a researcher, writer, teacher, and mentor. The essays, written by a range of established and younger eighteenth-century specialists, expand on the themes important to Rizzo: the importance of the archive, the contributions of women writers to the canon of eighteenth-century literature and to an emerging print culture, the sometimes fraught relations within the eighteenth-century family, the relationship between life and literature, and, finally, the role of female companionship in women's lives. Divided into three sections, "Living in the Eighteenth-Century Novel," "Living in the Eighteenth-Century World," and "Afterlives," the fourteen essays that form the body of the collection treat such topics as epistolarity, fraternal relations in novels and in families, women and travel in Jane Austen's novels, the pleasures and challenges of searching through archives to understand the complex entanglements of eighteenth-century families, the changing reception of Alexander Pope's poetry, and intersections among race, class, gender, and sexuality in a famous early-nineteenth-century Scottish libel case. The final essay of the fourteen connects the archetypal eighteenth-century figure of the seduced and abandoned woman to Sophie Calle's 2007 Venice Biennale exhibition entitled Take Care of Yourself, which the author reads as a direct descendant of the eighteenth-century letter novel. The book is framed by an introduction that situates the book as part of the ongoing redefinition of the archive of eighteenth-century literature and an afterword that gives a personal account of Rizzo's career and her indelible legacy as friend, mentor, and professional model. The contributors use a variety of methods in their scholarship, but a common strand is archival research and close reading inflected by feminist analysis. The book will appeal to students and scholars of eighteenth-century British literature and culture and to those interested in women's writing and women's relationships in the eighteenth century--and today--and in feminist literary history. The contributors to the volume practice the kind of scholarship Rizzo was known for--painstaking archival research and attention to the nuances of relationships among eighteenth-century women (and men)--and in so doing shed new light on a number of familiar and not-so-familiar eighteenth-century texts.
Описание: The Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Performance brings together a selection of particularly memorable performances to encourage an understanding of print as material object as well as theatrical medium, emphasising the immediacy - and changeability - of theatre during the long eighteenth century.
Описание: The Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Performance brings together a selection of particularly memorable performances to encourage an understanding of print as material object as well as theatrical medium, emphasising the immediacy - and changeability - of theatre during the long eighteenth century.
ООО "Логосфера " Тел:+7(495) 980-12-10 www.logobook.ru
