Description
Book SynopsisWhat is the role of literary writing in democratic society?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 thatwith liberty of expression becoming entrenched as a national valuethe 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 di
Trade ReviewWriting in Public offers a brilliant synthesis of a massive set of interrelated topics: how the public role of literature gradually and radically shifted; its legal, social and literary causes; and its long-term implications for the public. For those grappling with the question of what literature's public functions were or were supposed to do, Ross offers both an insightful and provoking guide.
—Andrew Benjamin Bricker, Ghent University,
Review of English StudiesWriting in Public makes an ambitious argument with ramifications both for our reading of eighteenth-century literature and our contemporary understanding of literature as a form of public speech. One key strength of Ross's book is the way that highly specific examples are engagingly narrated and then open out into broad historical claims . . . [S]cholars in all areas of eighteenth century studies, as well as historians of free speech and the law, will find it a valuable resource.
—Hannah Doherty Hudson,
Eighteenth-Century FictionWhat Ross styles 'a cultural history of ideas about literature's place in the public sphere,' is timely and worth reading . . . This strikingly original volume is largely juridical; while Ben Jonson, Daniel Defoe, and Alexander Pope have their cameos,
Writing in Public devotes itself to jurists and their legal reasoning as they debated intellectual property, perpetual copyright, the liberty of criticism, seditious libel, and so on.
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University of Toronto QuarterlyTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Writing in Public
Part I. Copyright
1. Literature in the Public Domain
2. The Fate of Style in an Age of Intellectual Property
Part II. Defamation and Privacy
3. What Does Literature Publicize?
4. How Criticism Became Privileged Speech: The Case of Carr v. Hood (1808)
Part III. Seditious Libel
5. Literature and the Freedom of Mind
Epilogue: Unacknowledged Legislators
Notes
Index
