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Poetics of the Pillory - English Literature and Seditious Libel, 1660-1820 (Hardcover)
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Poetics of the Pillory - English Literature and Seditious Libel, 1660-1820 (Hardcover)
Series: Clarendon Lectures in English
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On the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695, Thomas Macaulay wrote in
his History of England, 'English literature was emancipated, and
emancipated for ever, from the control of the government'. It's
certainly true that the system of prior restraint enshrined in this
Restoration measure was now at an end, at least for print. Yet the
same cannot be said of government control, which came to operate
instead by means of post-publication retribution, not
pre-publication licensing, notably for the common-law offence of
seditious libel. For many of the authors affected, from Defoe to
Cobbett, this new regime was a greater constraint on expression
than the old, not least for its alarming unpredictability, and for
the spectacular punishment-the pillory-that was sometimes entailed.
Yet we may also see the constraint as an energizing force.
Throughout the eighteenth century and into the Romantic period,
writers developed and refined ingenious techniques for
communicating dissident or otherwise contentious meanings while
rendering the meanings deniable. As a work of both history and
criticism, this book traces the rise and fall of seditious libel
prosecution, and with it the theatre of the pillory, while arguing
that the period's characteristic forms of literary
complexity-ambiguity, ellipsis, indirection, irony-may be traced to
the persistence of censorship in the post-licensing world. The
argument proceeds through case studies of major poets and prose
writers including Dryden, Defoe, Pope, Fielding, Johnson, and
Southey, and also calls attention to numerous little-known satires
and libels across the extended period.
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