Writings and Their Publics: Law and Literature in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

The changing role of “the public” figures prominently in both legal and literary studies of the eighteenth century. Trevor Ross’s Writing in Public (2018) demonstrates how legal changes relating to copyright, defamation, and seditious libel shaped the emergence of a new category of literature in the later eighteenth century. The work develops a schematic and idealist account of the changing relationship between norms of law and literature as mediated by the idea of “the public” that might be enhanced by further attention to the continued diversity of literary expression and literary sociability that has characterized a substantial amount of recent scholarship on the eighteenth century. It also remains unclear as to whether the eighteenth-century notions of publicity were really novel, especially in the light of work on medieval and renaissance era notions of public opinion that demonstrate that the concept has a long history that is not unique to the modern era.