An edition of Privacy (2003)
Privacy
concealing the eighteenth-century self
By Patricia Ann Meyer Spacks
Publish Date
2003
Publisher
University of Chicago Press
Language
eng
Pages
242
Description:
"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.