Privacy concealing the eighteenth-century self / [electronic resource] :
Patricia Meyer Spacks.
- University of Chicago Press, 2003.
- 1 online resource (vii, 242 p.)
Includes bibliographical references (p. 229-236) and index.
Privacies -- Privacies of reading -- The performance of sensibility -- Privacy, dissimulation, and propriety -- Private conversations -- Exposures : sex, privacy, and sensibility -- Trivial pursuits -- Privacy as enablement.
"In Privacy, Patricia Meyer Spacks explores eighteenth-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 because it might conceal desire. 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."--Jacket.
English fiction--History and criticism.--18th century Privacy in literature. Secrecy in literature. Self in literature. Roman anglais--Histoire et critique.--18e siècle Vie privée dans la littérature. Secret dans la littérature. Moi (Psychologie) dans la littérature. LITERARY CRITICISM--European--English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh. Fictie. Engels. Privacy. Geheimen. Zelf. Privatheit Literatur.