Privacy [[electronic resource] ] : concealing the eighteenth-century self / / Patricia Meyer Spacks

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910465750403321
• Autore: Spacks Patricia Ann Meyer
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Chicago, : University of Chicago Press, 2003
• ISBN: 1-283-15083-2; 9786613150837; 0-226-76861-9
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (251 p.)
• Disciplina: 823/.509353
• Soggetti: English fiction - 18th century - History and criticism; Privacy in literature; Secrecy in literature; Self in literature; Electronic books.
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Privacies -- Privacies of reading -- The performance of sensibility -- Privacy, dissimulation, and propriety -- Private conversations -- Exposures : sex, privacy, and sensibility -- Trivial pursuits -- Privacy as enablement.
• Sommario/riassunto: Today we consider privacy a right to be protected. But in eighteenth-century England, privacy was seen as a problem, even a threat. Women reading alone and people hiding their true thoughts from one another in conversation generated fears of uncontrollable fantasies and profound anxieties about insincerity. In Privacy, Patricia Meyer Spacks explores eighteenth-century concerns about privacy and the strategies people developed to avoid public scrutiny and social pressure. She examines, for instance, the way people hid behind common rules of etiquette to mask their innermost feelings and how, in fact, people were taught to employ such devices. She considers the erotic overtones that privacy aroused in its suppression of deeper desires. And perhaps most important, she explores the idea of privacy as a societal threat-one that bred pretense and hypocrisy in its practitioners. Through ; inspired readings of novels by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne, along with a penetrating glimpse into diaries, autobiographies, poems, and works of pornography written during the period, Spacks ultimately shows how writers charted the imaginative possibilities of privacy and its social repercussions. Finely nuanced and elegantly conceived, Spacks's new work will fascinate anyone who has relished concealment or mourned its recent demise.