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

Abstract

Book Review| March 01 2020 Writing in Public: Literature and the Liberty of the Press in Eighteenth-Century Britain Writing in Public: Literature and the Liberty of the Press in Eighteenth-Century Britain. By Ross, Trevor. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. xi + 301 pp. Klaus Stierstorfer Klaus Stierstorfer Klaus Stierstorfer is chair of British studies at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster. He is spokesperson of the Collaborative Research Center 1385 “Law and Literature” in Münster. His coedited volume Literarische Form is forthcoming. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Modern Language Quarterly (2020) 81 (1): 128–130. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-7933128 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Klaus Stierstorfer; Writing in Public: Literature and the Liberty of the Press in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Modern Language Quarterly 1 March 2020; 81 (1): 128–130. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-7933128 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsModern Language Quarterly Search Advanced Search The problem “What is literature?” has no generally accepted solution in literary studies. Through a new account of the origins of the modern concept of literature, Trevor Ross provides a highly original explanation for the lack of an answer, namely, that indefinability must be considered one of literature’s constitutive attributes and that it thereby acquires a prime function within a modern, democratic concept of the public.1Writing in Public follows up on Ross’s magisterial Making of the English Literary Canon (1998), which had a similar chronological focus, exploring developments going back in literary and cultural history and coming to a head, in Ross’s argument, in the eighteenth century. That book documented “the shift in canon formation from production to consumption” in a trajectory toward the birth of a “literary experience . . . as an isolated and autonomous activity” (Ross 1998... Copyright © 2020 by University of Washington2020 Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.