
Privacy
Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self
Patricia Meyer Spacks(Author)
University of Chicago Press
Published on 1. June 2003
Book
Hardback
256 pages
978-0-226-76860-1 (ISBN)
Description
Today we consider privacy a right to be protected. But in 18th-century England, privacy was seen as a problem, even a threat. Women reading alone and people hiding their true thoughts from one another in conversation generated fears of uncontrollable fantasies and profound anxieties about insincerity. In "Privacy", Patricia Meyer Spacks explores 18th-century concerns about privacy and the strategies people developed to avoid public scrutiny and social pressure. She examines, for instance, the way people hid behind common rules of etiquette to mask their innermost feelings and how, in fact, people were taught to employ such devices. She considers the erotic overtones that privacy aroused in its suppression of deeper desires. And perhaps most important, she explores the idea of privacy as a societal threat - one that bred pretense and hypocrisy in its practitioners. Through inspired readings of novels by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding and Sterne, along with a penetrating glimpse into diaries, autobiographies, poems and works of pornography written during the period, Spacks ultimately shows how writers charted the imaginative possibilities of privacy and its social repercussions.
Finely nuanced and elegantly conceived, Spack's new work should interest anyone who has relished concealment or mourned its recent demise.
Finely nuanced and elegantly conceived, Spack's new work should interest anyone who has relished concealment or mourned its recent demise.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Chicago
United States
Publishing group
The University of Chicago Press
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 23 mm
Width: 16 mm
Thickness: 2 mm
Weight
510 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-226-76860-1 (9780226768601)
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E-Book
04/2011
1st Edition
University of Chicago Press
€66.49
Available for download