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On the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695, Thomas Macaulay wrote in his History of England, 'English literature was emancipated, and emancipated for ever, from the control of the government'. It's certainly true that the system of prior restraint enshrined in this Restoration measure was now at an end, at least for print. Yet the same cannot be said of government control, which came to operate instead by means of post-publication retribution, not pre-publication licensing, notably for the common-law offence of seditious libel. For many of the authors affected, from Defoe to Cobbett, this new regime was a greater constraint on expression than the old, not least for its alarming unpredictability, and for the spectacular punishment—the pillory—that was sometimes entailed. Yet we may also see the constraint as an energizing force. Throughout the eighteenth century and into the Romantic period, writers developed and refined ingenious techniques for communicating dissident or otherwise contentious meanings while rendering the meanings deniable. As a work of both history and criticism, this book traces the rise and fall of seditious libel prosecution, and with it the theatre of the pillory, while arguing that the period's characteristic forms of literary complexity—ambiguity, ellipsis, indirection, irony—may be traced to the persistence of censorship in the post-licensing world. The argument proceeds through case studies of major poets and prose writers including Dryden, Defoe, Pope, Fielding, Johnson, and Southey, and also calls attention to numerous little-known satires and libels across the extended period.
This volume explores literary censorship from 1660 to 1820 and examines the relationship between pervasive literary modes of the long eighteenth century and the control of seditious libel and punishment in the public pillory.
Historicist readings of the politics and ethics exhibited in a range of medieval texts including Chaucer, Malory and the York Corpus Christi plays. Critical historicist readings engage with the politics and ethics of selected medieval texts, addressing a wide range of literature and topics of enquiry: Langland, Chaucer, and the Pearl-poet, Malory and the York Corpus Christi plays; chivalric cultures, their forms of identity and mourning; and the politics, ethics and theology of some of the most fascinating writing in late medieval England. Intended as a tribute to Professor Derek Pearsall, andreflecting his major contribution to medieval literary criticism, they are an important addition to the critical and historical study of the period.DAVID AERS is James B. Duke Professor of English and Professor of Historical Theology at Duke University.
Orignally published in 1979. Poetic Presence and Illusion brings together Krieger's speculation on literature and its effect on the reader. The poem, Krieger argues, is an illusionary presence and an ever-present illusion. It exists for the reader, like a drama before an audience, only within an illusionary context. But the illusion should not be taken lightly as a false substitute for reality. It is itself a real and positive force: it is what we see and, as such, is constitutive of our reality, even if our critical faculty de-constitutes that reality by viewing it as no more than an illusion. The coupling of poetic presence and poetic illusion serves to describe the relationship between poetry as metaphor and the reader's sense of personal and poetic reality. Krieger examines the workings of selected Renaissance and contemporary poems with regard to this dual nature and evaluates the work of literary critics (himself included) who have been concerned with this doubleness. Poetic Presence and Illusion allows readers who have read Krieger's earlier work to understand the development of his critical position.