The Constitution of Literature

by Morrissey, Lee

• ISBN13: 9780804757867
• ISBN10: 0804757860
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-12-19
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

The Constitution of Literaturechallenges the prevailing understanding of the relationship between literature and democracy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when both literature and democracy were acquiring their modern forms. Against the heroic story of criticism shaping the modern public sphere as recounted by Habermas and his followers, it explores how different resistances to democratized reading preoccupied the thinking of the major English literary critics of the time. By paying attention to how critics participated in a debate over theories of reading--its processes for acquiring meaning from the page, its psychological and social effects on individuals, and its diffusion across the population--this book offers a new understanding of the political history of early literary criticism.

Author Biography

Lee Morrissey is Professor of English at Clemson University. He is the author of From the Temple to the Castle: An Architectural History of British Literature, 1660-1760 (1999) and the editor of Debating the Canon: A Reader, from Addison to Nafisi (2005).

Table of Contents

Preface : rethinking the history of criticism
Introduction : Habermas and the resistance to reading in early English literary criticism	p. 1
Radical literacy and radical democracy in the 1640s	p. 25
"God forgive you Common-wealths-men" : Dryden and the project of restoration	p. 61
"Avoid disputes" : The spectator, the market, and criticism	p. 87
Early eighteenth-century rules for reading : an act of settlement	p. 112
Hume, the politics of passion, and reading	p. 133
Samuel Johnson, the Constitution, and the exuberance of signification	p. 155
Conclusion : the Enlightenment and the unfinished project of deconstruction	p. 181
Notes	p. 201
Bibliography	p. 217
Index	p. 235
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