Privacy : concealing the eighteenth-century self / Patricia Meyer Spacks.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Spacks, Patricia Meyer.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English fiction--18th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

Privacy in literature.

Secrecy in literature.

Self in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (251 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Today we consider privacy a right to be protected. But in eighteenth-century England, privacy was seen as a problem, even a threat. Women reading alone and people hiding their true thoughts from one another in conversation generated fears of uncontrollable fantasies and profound anxieties about insincerity. In Privacy, Patricia Meyer Spacks explores eighteenth-century concerns about privacy and the strategies people developed to avoid public scrutiny and social pressure. She examines, for instance, the way people hid behind common rules of etiquette to mask their innermost feelings and how, in fact, people were taught to employ such devices. She considers the erotic overtones that privacy aroused in its suppression of deeper desires. And perhaps most important, she explores the idea of privacy as a societal threat-one that bred pretense and hypocrisy in its practitioners. Through inspired readings of novels by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne, along with a penetrating glimpse into diaries, autobiographies, poems, and works of pornography written during the period, Spacks ultimately shows how writers charted the imaginative possibilities of privacy and its social repercussions. Finely nuanced and elegantly conceived, Spacks's new work will fascinate anyone who has relished concealment or mourned its recent demise.

Contents:

Privacies

Privacies of reading

The performance of sensibility

Privacy, dissimulation, and propriety

Private conversations

Exposures : sex, privacy, and sensibility

Trivial pursuits

Privacy as enablement.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786613150837

9781283150835

1283150832

9780226768618

0226768619

OCLC:

721195551