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Writing in Public - Literature and the Liberty of the Press in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Hardcover)
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Discovery Miles 12 720
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Writing in Public - Literature and the Liberty of the Press in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Hardcover)
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Total price: R1,292
Discovery Miles: 12 920
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What 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 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.
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