Re-reading Reading in Eighteenth-Century Literary Criticism
FAIN: FT-51577-03
Lee Morrissey
Clemson University (Clemson, SC 29634-0001)
I am applying for a Summer Stipend to support writing the final chapter of my book, The Constitution of Literature: Literacy, Democracy, and the Rise of English Literary Criticism, during the summer of 2003. The book brings together current research in the history of the book with current debates in political philosophy. Focusing on debates over the definition of reading between the Civil Wars of the 1640s and the mid eighteenth-century works of Samuel Johnson, I reconfigure the political history of early English literary criticism. Where the current story of early English literary criticism sees it as contributing to the rise of the modern, rational public sphere, this approach instead traces a contest over democracies, plural.
Media Coverage
Of Great Books and Kingdoms (Review)
Author(s): Andrew Hadfield
Publication: Times Literary Supplement
Date: 11/28/2008
Associated Products
The Constitution of Literature: Literacy, Democracy, and Early English Literary Criticism (Book)Title: The Constitution of Literature: Literacy, Democracy, and Early English Literary Criticism
Author: Lee Morrissey
Abstract: The Constitution of Literature challenges the prevailing understanding of the relationship between literature and democracy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when both literature and democracy were acquiring their modern forms. Against the heroic story of criticism shaping the modern public sphere as recounted by Habermas and his followers, this study explores how different resistances to democratized reading preoccupied the thinking of the major English literary critics of the time. By paying attention to how critics participated in a debate over theories of reading--its processes for acquiring meaning from the page, its psychological and social effects on individuals, and its diffusion across the population--the book offers a new understanding of the political history of early literary criticism.
Year: 2008
Primary URL:
http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=11822Publisher: Stanford UP
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780804757867
Debating the Canon: A Reader from Addison to Nafisi (Book)Title: Debating the Canon: A Reader from Addison to Nafisi
Editor: Lee Morrissey
Abstract: An anthology of 47 essays, situating the canon debate in the history of English literary criticism.
Year: 2005
Primary URL:
http://us.macmillan.com/debatingthecanon/LeeMorrisseyPublisher: Palgrave
Type: Edited Volume
ISBN: 978-1-4039-682