The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere by Paul Keen

Abstract

Paul Keen. The Crisis o f Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the PublicSphere. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1999. Pp. 300. Like many scholars and critics of the past few decades, Paul Keen (of Carleton University) examines the place of literature in the world-his­ torical revolution of the 1790s in order to reflect on what many see as a world-historical crisis today. As Keen states, the “object” of The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere “is the long history of the changing status of literature as a public sphere, but its focus crystallizes in the 1790s when the contradictions inherent in this discourse were most dramatically foregrounded” (10). Historicizing literature and the 1790s enables us to historicize the present, when historicism is understood as a major instrument of critical analysis for us now. Keen’s history is an exemplary development of this use of historicism. Its roots are in the post-war transformation in universities and aca­ demic disciplines as thousands of students, and eventually professors, from classes and social groups who historically had not participated in higher education challenged received academic and cultural institutions, attitudes, and assumptions. One result was the rapid growth in the 1960s and 1970s of historical studies building on a leftist tradition of social his­ tory, and examining the classes and groups from which such students and professors themselves came. In English studies, major beneficiaries were historical periods characterized by lower- and middle-class resis­ tance, protest, and revolt such as the English Civil War and the era of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars. The past three decades have seen a steady development of research on those periods, among others. Over these decades, such work has responded in various ways and degrees to the rise of critical sociology, the “linguistic turn,” structuralist and post-structuralist theory, new Marxism, psychoanalytic theory, and feminism during the 1970s; to post-colonial theory and criticism and theories and histories of sexuality during the 1980s; and, increasing after 1989 and the proclaimed triumph of liberalism, to renewed interest in the nature of civil society and the public sphere, and in the history and destiny of the modern liberal state. For the Revolutionary and Romantic period alone, these movements in research and criticism, at times interacting, at times collaborating, at times contending, have produced a substantial library of monographs, academic journals, essays, editions, dictionaries and encyclopaedias, publishers’ series, and databases and websites, not to mention conferences, associations, and discussion lists. The revolu- tion—be it the social-intellectual revolution of the past half century or the revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—has, it seems, been accommodated in the academy. Whether this accommodation should make us feel comfortable or uneasy is another question. The Crisis ofLiterature in the 1790s is one of the best recent contribu­ tions to this library of Revolution and Romantic studies. It originated as a doctoral dissertation at one centre of historicist Revolutionary-Romantic literary studies, in the University of York (England), led by John Barrell, pioneering scholar in the field. Keen’s book is published in the major venue for such new work—Cambridge Studies in Romanticism edited by two other pioneers, Marilyn Butler of Oxford and James Chandler of Chicago. Like their work, The Crisis ofLiterature grows out of the work of Raymond Williams (with E. P. Thompson’s work also in the background). Keen also scrupulously employs insights from most of the critical and theoretical movements described earlier, especially new left, feminist, and post-colo­ nial criticism, examining a wide range of texts, literary and non-literary, by writers major and minor, canonical and otherwise. In his introduction, titled “Problems now and then,” Keen points out salient similarities between the 1790s in Britain, at the moment of struggle over formation of the literary institution as it would be known for two centuries, and the new questioning of that institution by a wide array of groups in the late twentieth century. Keen pursues this connection throughout the chapters that follow. In Part One, “The Enlightenment,” he describes the new “republic of letters” and the new “men of letters,” and in Part...