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The strength of the book lies in the wealth of historical, literary, and pictorial examples that evoke the texture of domesticity, from bedchambers to bigamy.
Its central argument is wonderfully simple... McKeon will set new agendas in the understanding of the early modern to modern eras.
Those in the fields of 17th- and 18th-century cultural studies will find this book fascinating.
The scholarship is breathtaking and the intellectual analysis rigorous.
McKeon's scholarship is commanding, his erudition staggering, his systematic rigour and intellectual control steady and sure.
A gift to all teachers and scholars of the British novel.
I have assigned this book to graduate students... Accounting for most of what has gone on in the last thirty years of scholarship in its dynamic synthesis, The Secret History of Domesticity lays the groundwork for new inquiry into eighteenth-century life. As a reader, as a scholar, and as a teacher, I am grateful for it.
What defines The Secret History is its elegant waving of thousands of facts, prints, quotations, dates, events and characters.
A deliciously rich and generous exploration of the material and conceptual separation of the public from the private, one that illuminates just about every aspect of what it means to be modern: political, sexual, literary, artistic. The erudition is staggering; the play of history and representation is subtle and elegant; the openings to philosophy, to the sociology of knowledge, and to political theory are imaginative and often unexpected. No one will come away from reading this book without learning a great deal about the past and about how to read and to see. To paraphrase Lévi-Strauss, McKeon shows that 'public' and 'private' are good to think with, even better than we might have thought.
About
Book Details
Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6.125
x 9.25
Pages
904
ISBN
9780801885402
Illustration Description
2 halftones, 84 line drawings, 11 color plates
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The Division of Knowledge
The Public and the Private
Domesticity
Form and Spatial Representability
Questions of Method
Part I: The Age of Separations
1. The
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The Division of Knowledge
The Public and the Private
Domesticity
Form and Spatial Representability
Questions of Method
Part I: The Age of Separations
1. The Devolution of Absolutism
State and Civil Society
From Tacit to Explicit
Polis and Oikos
The State and the Family
Absolute Private Property
Interest and the Public Interest
Civic Humanism or Capitalist Ideology?
From the Marketplace to the Market
The Protestant Separation
Conscientious Privacy and the Closet of Devotion
What Is the Public Sphere?
2. Publishing the Private
The Plasticity of Print
Scribal Publication
Print, Property, and the Public Interest
Print Legislation and Copyright
Knowledge and Secrecy
Public Opinion
What Was the Public Sphere?
Publicness through Virtuality
Publication and Personality
Anonymity and Responsibility
Libel versus Satire
Characters, Authors, Readers
Particulars and Generals
Actual and Concrete Particularity
3. From State as Family to Family as State
State as Family
Family as State
Coming Together
Being Together
Putting Asunder
Tory Feminism and the Devolution of Absolutism
Privacy and Pastoral
4. Outside and Inside Work
The Domestic Economy and Cottage Industry
The Economic Basis of Separate Spheres
Housewife as Governor
The Whore's Labor
The Whores Rhetorick
5. Subdividing Inside Spaces
Separating Out "Science"
The Royal Household
Cabinet and Closet
Secrets and the Secretary
Noble and Gentle Households
The Curtain Lecture
Households of the Middling Sort
Where the Poor Should Live
6. Sex and Book Sex
Sex
Aristotle's Master-piece
Onania
Book Sex
Protopornography: Sex and Religion
Protopornography: Sex and Politics
The Law of Obscene Libel
Part II: Domestication as Form
7. Motives for Domestication
The Productivity of the Division of Knowledge
Domestication as Hermeneutics
Domestication as Pedagogy
Disembedding Epistemology from Social Status
Scientific Disinterestedness
Civic Disinterestedness
Aesthetic Disinterestedness
8. Mixed Genres
Tragicomedy
Romance
Mock Epic
Pastoral
Christ in the House of Martha and Mary
9. Figures of Domestication
Narrative Concentration
Narrative Concretization
Part III: Secret Histories
10. The Narration of Public Crisis
What Is a Secret History?
Sidney and Barclay
Opening the King's Cabinet
Opening the Queen's Closet
Scudéry
Women and Romance
The King Out of Power
The King in Power
The Secret of the Black Box
The Secret of The Holy War
11. Behn's Love-Letters
Love versus War?
Love versus Friendship
Fathers versus Children
Effeminacy and the Public Wife
Gender without Sex
From Epistolary to Third Person
From Female Duplicity to Female Interiority
Love-Letters and Pornography
12. Toward the Narration of Private Life
The Secret of the Warming Pan
The Private Lives of William, Mary, and Anne
The Privatization of the Secret History
The Strange Case of Beau Wilson
13. Secret History as Autobiography
Preface on Congreve
Manley's New Atalantis
Manley's Rivella
Postscript on Pope
14. Secret History as Novel
Defoe and Swift
Jane Barker and Mary Hearne
Haywood's Secret Histories
Richardson's Pamela
15. Variations on the Domestic Novel
Fanny Hill
Tristram Shandy
Humphry Clinker
Pride and Prejudice
Notes
Index
