News Craze: Public Sphere and the Eighteenth-Century Theatrical Depiction of Newspaper Culture

Abstract

This article examines the depiction of “newspaper culture” -- i.e, the increasing obsession with news and newspapers and current events — in the eighteenth-century London theater, through the prevalence of “Quidnunc” (or news-obsessed) characters of both genders and all social classes. It places this phenomenon in the context of current theories of publics and the public sphere, and as a “test-case” especially for Habermas's theories of the political public sphere.