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Author:

Ross, Trevor Thornton, 1961- author.

Title:

Writing in public : literature and the liberty of the press in eighteenth-century Britain / Trevor Ross.

Publisher:

Johns Hopkins University Press,

Copyright Date:

2018

Description:

301 pages ; 24 cm

Subject:

Literature and society--Great Britain--History--18th century.
Copyright--Great Britain--History--18th century.
Democracy and the arts--Great Britain.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 239-287) and index.

Contents:

Introduction : writing in public -- Copyright. Literature in the public domain -- The fate of style in an age of intellectual property -- Defamation and privacy. What does literature publicize? -- How criticism became privileged speech : the case of Carr v. Hood (1808) -- Seditious libel. Literature and the freedom of mind -- Epilogue : unacknowledged legislators.

Summary:

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.

ISBN:

9781421426327
1421426323
1421426315
9781421426310

OCLC:

(OCoLC)1025429706

LCCN:

2017058445

Locations:

USUX851 -- Iowa State University - Parks Library (Ames)

OVUX522 -- University of Iowa Libraries (Iowa City)