TREVOR ROSS. Writing in Public: Literature and the Liberty of the Press in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Abstract

At the heart of Trevor Ross’s important new book, Writing in Public, is literature’s ‘role in public life’, which ‘underwent radical revision at the levels of both theory and practice during the transition to democracy’ (p. 225). His interest in this question has less to do with what literature actually did than in how its functions as a ‘public discourse’ (p. 3) were reconceptualized during the last decades of the eighteenth century. His jumping off point for this ‘cultural history of ideas about literature’s place in the public sphere’ (p. 3) is the ‘liberalization of public expression’ during this period, which in turn ‘necessitated a redefinition of literature’s social functions’ (p. 2). As Ross argues, the growing liberty of the press during the eighteenth century entailed changes in how both the public and writers thought about literature. For instance, alongside this liberalization there was a ‘broad reorganization of discourse in which […] literature was displaced as a vehicle of opinion by newer modes of public speech even as its value in expressing personal and cultural meaning was reaffirmed’ (p. 2). Or, put slightly differently, Ross is interested in providing ‘the early history’ to Jacques Rancière’s claim that the relationship between literature and democracy has fundamentally changed. As Ross writes, quoting Rancière, by the late eighteenth-century literature was no longer ‘a rhetorical instrument for imposing the will of the rulers on the ruled’ but ‘a mechanism of “self-interpretation and self-poeticization of life,” whose world-making functions anyone could appropriate’ (p. 2).