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  3. The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s
  • Cited by 62
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
September 2009
Print publication year:
1999
Online ISBN:
9780511484339
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511484339
Subjects:
Literature, History, English Literature 1700-1830, History of Ideas and Intellectual History
Series:
Cambridge Studies in Romanticism (36)
Information

Book description

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.

Reviews

"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

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