The crisis of literature in the 1790s: print culture and the public sphere

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Keen, Paul 1963- (Author)
Format: Electronic eBook
Language:English
Published: Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1999
Series:Cambridge studies in Romanticism 36
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Online Access:DE-12
DE-473
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Summary: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
Item Description:Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015)
Physical Description:1 online resource (xii, 299 pages)
ISBN:9780511484339
DOI:10.1017/CBO9780511484339

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