18th century
1900s
A01=Patricia Meyer Spacks
academic
analysis
anxiety
Author_Patricia Meyer Spacks
autobiography
Category=DSB
Category=NH
close reading
college
defoe
desire
diary
emotions
england
english
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
erotic
fear
fielding
higher ed
historical
history
humanities
hypocrisy
insincerity
novels
poetry
pornography
pressure
privacy
propriety
public
research
richardson
rights
scholarly
sex
sincerity
social studies
society
sterne
time period
uk
united kingdom
university
Product details
- ISBN 9780226768601
- Weight: 510g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 01 Jun 2003
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
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.
