The crisis of literature in the 1790s : print culture and the public sphere / / Paul Keen [[electronic resource]]

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910778866703321
• Autore: Keen Paul <1963->
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Cambridge : , : Cambridge University Press, , 1999
• ISBN: 1-107-11767-4; 0-511-00384-6; 1-280-15388-1; 0-511-11782-5; 0-511-14962-X; 0-511-30977-5; 0-511-48433-X; 0-511-04840-8
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (xii, 299 pages) : digital, PDF file(s)
• Collana: Cambridge studies in Romanticism ; ; 36
• Disciplina: 820.9/006
• Soggetti: English literature - 18th century - History and criticism; Literature - Public opinion - History - 18th century; Authorship - Public opinion - History - 18th century; Literature and society - Great Britain - History - 18th century; Books and reading - Great Britain - History - 18th century; Romanticism - Great Britain - History - 18th century; Printing - Great Britain - History - 18th century; Great Britain History 1789-1820
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (p. 279-291) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Introduction problems now and then -- Republic of letters -- Men of letters -- Preamble swinish multitudes -- poorer sort -- Masculine women -- Oriental literature -- Conclusion romantic revisions.
• Sommario/riassunto: 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.