Patricia Meyer Spacks
Today
we consider privacy a right to be protected. But in eighteenth-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 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 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, Spacks's new work will fascinate anyone
who has relished concealment or mourned its recent demise.
"[A] good and informative
book."--Frank Kermode, London Review of Books
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Privacies
2. Privacies of Reading
3. The Performance of Sensibility
4. Privacy, Dissimulation, and Propriety
5. Private Conversations
6. Exposures: Sex, Privacy, and Sensibility
7. Trivial Pursuits
8. Privacy as Enablement
Afterword
Works Cited
Index
Subjects:
* Literature and Literary Criticism: British and Irish Literature
The University of Chicago
Press
256 p. 2003
Cloth $36.00sp 0-226-76860-0 Spring 2003
Lisa
M. Gordis
What role did the Bible
really play in Puritan New England? Many have treated it as a blunt instrument
used to cudgel dissenters into submission, but Lisa M. Gordis reveals instead
that Puritan readings of the Bible showed great complexity and literary sophistication--so
much complexity, in fact, that controversies over biblical interpretation threatened
to tear Puritan society apart.
Drawing on Puritan preaching manuals and sermons as well as the texts of early
religious controversies, Gordis argues that Puritan ministers did not expect
to impose their views on their congregations. Instead they believed that interpretive
consensus would emerge from the process of reading the Bible, with the Holy
Spirit assisting readers to understand God's will. Treating the conflict over
Roger Williams, the Antinomian Controversy, and the reluctant compromises of
the Halfway Covenant as symptoms of a crisis that was as much literary as it
was social or spiritual, Opening Scripture explores the profound consequences
of Puritan negotiations over biblical interpretation for New England's literature
and history.
272 p. (est.). 2002
Cloth $39.00sp 0-226-30412-4 Fall 2002
Leslie
M. Harris
In 1991 in lower Manhattan,
a team of construction workers made an astonishing discovery. Just two blocks
from city hall, under twenty feet of asphalt, concrete, and rubble, lay the
remains of an eighteenth-century "Negro Burial Ground." Closed in
1790 and covered over by roads and buildings throughout the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, the site turned out to be the largest such find in North America,
containing the remains of as many as 20,000 African Americans. The graves revealed
to New Yorkers and the nation an aspect of American history long hidden: the
vast number of enslaved blacks who labored to create our nation's largest city.
In the Shadow of Slavery lays bare this history of African Americans in New
York, starting with the arrival of the first slaves in 1626, moving through
the turbulent years before emancipation in 1827, and culminating in one of the
most terrifying displays of racism in U.S. history, the New York City Draft
Riots of 1863. Drawing on extensive travel accounts, autobiographies, newspapers,
literature, and organizational records, Leslie M. Harris extends beyond prior
studies of racial discrimination. She traces the undeniable impact of African
Americans on class, politics, and community formation, offering vivid portraits
of the lives and aspirations of countless black New Yorkers.
Written with clarity and grace, In the Shadow of Slavery is an ambitious new
work that will prove indispensable to historians of the African American experience,
as well as anyone interested in the history of New York City.
360 p. (est.), 20 halftones,
7 maps. 2002 Series: (HSUA) Historical Studies of Urban America
Cloth $42.50sp 0-226-31774-9 Fall 2002
August 22, 2003