Still Comfortable After All These Years: A Response

Abstract

In Writing in Public: Literature and the Liberty of the Press (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), I describe how the public function of literature changed as a result of developing press freedoms during the period from 1760 to 1810. I examine contests over the laws of copyright, defamation, privacy, 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. This issue of Critical Analysis of Law offers reviews of my book by Brian Cowan, Leslie Kendrick, Karen Petroski, and Elliott Visconsi. In this brief article, I address some of the reservations these reviewers express about my argument in the book, and in particular about its approach and tone. I note my own similar concerns, and I elaborate on what I see as some of the repercussions for my argument of having to limit its scope. I also restate my findings more forcefully to make clear that the position I take on the history I relate is not quite any of the several divergent positions that the reviewers attribute to me. My aim in the book, I emphasize, is to describe the consequences of a kind of cultural trade-off between literature and the law, among other discourses, that occurred in the transition to democracy, but I refrain from taking a position on these consequences.