Author : Raymond Birn
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 20,6 MB
Release : 2012
Category : History
ISBN : 9780804763592
Rather than envision themselves as agents of state-sponsored repression, the royal book censors of eighteenth-century France wished, through their reports and decisions, to guide the literary traffic of the Enlightenment and expand public awareness of progressive thought.
Author : Robert Darnton
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 282 pages
File Size : 40,20 MB
Release : 2014-09-22
Category : History
ISBN : 0393242307
"Splendid…[Darnton gives] us vivid, hard-won detail, illuminating narrative, and subtle, original insight." —Timothy Garton Ash, New York Review of Books With his uncanny ability to spark life in the past, Robert Darnton re-creates three historical worlds in which censorship shaped literary expression in distinctive ways. In eighteenth-century France, censors, authors, and booksellers collaborated in making literature by navigating the intricate culture of royal privilege. Even as the king's censors outlawed works by Voltaire, Rousseau, and other celebrated Enlightenment writers, the head censor himself incubated Diderot’s great Encyclopedie by hiding the banned project’s papers in his Paris townhouse. Relationships at court trumped principle in the Old Regime. Shaken by the Sepoy uprising in 1857, the British Raj undertook a vast surveillance of every aspect of Indian life, including its literary output. Years later the outrage stirred by the British partition of Bengal led the Raj to put this knowledge to use. Seeking to suppress Indian publications that it deemed seditious, the British held hearings in which literary criticism led to prison sentences. Their efforts to meld imperial power and liberal principle fed a growing Indian opposition. In Communist East Germany, censorship was a component of the party program to engineer society. Behind the unmarked office doors of Ninety Clara-Zetkin Street in East Berlin, censors developed annual plans for literature in negotiation with high party officials and prominent writers. A system so pervasive that it lodged inside the authors’ heads as self-censorship, it left visible scars in the nation’s literature. By rooting censorship in the particulars of history, Darnton's revealing study enables us to think more clearly about efforts to control expression past and present.
Author : Robert Darnton
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 468 pages
File Size : 38,53 MB
Release : 1996
Category : History
ISBN : 9780393314427
Robert Darnton's work is one of the main reasons that cultural history has become an exciting study central to our understanding of the past.
Author : Jane McLeod
Publisher : Penn State Press
Page : 314 pages
File Size : 23,98 MB
Release : 2011
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0271037687
"Explores the evolution of the idea that the rise of print culture was a threat to the royal government of eighteenth-century France. Argues that French printers did much to foster this view as they negotiated a place in the expanding bureaucratic apparatus of the state"--Provided by publisher.
Author : Johnson Kent Wright
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 274 pages
File Size : 42,69 MB
Release : 1997-06-01
Category : History
ISBN : 0804764972
This is an intellectual biography of Gabriel Bonnot de Mably (1709-85), who emerges as a central figure in the history of republican thought in the era of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. This book has two related aims. The first is to fill an important gap in historical scholarship. Although Mably, whose career as a historian and political theorist stretched from 1740 to the eve of the French Revolution, clearly played a major role in the intellectual history of his era, there has been no study of his life and thought in English for nearly seventy years. At the same time, the book seeks to advance a novel interpretation of Mably's thought. He has most often been portrayed in two sharply contrasted ways, either as one of a handful of utopian communists and a precursor of nineteenth-century socialism, or as a deeply conservative enemy of the Enlightenment. This study sets forth a different reading of Mably's thought, one that shows him to be a classical republican, in the sense this term has acquired in recent years for students of early modern political thought. Mably was the author of the most comprehensive and influential body of republican thought produced in eighteenth-century France—a claim with implications that go beyond the merely biographical. These are explored in a final chapter, which draws some conclusions about the character of classical republicanism in France and about the French contribution to the republican tradition in Europe.
Author : Mogens Lærke
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 217 pages
File Size : 44,97 MB
Release : 2009
Category : History
ISBN : 900417558X
The ambition is of this volume to study the role censorship played in the intellectual culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, how it was implemented, and how it affected the development philosophy and literary writing. It contains contributions by intellectual historians, philosophers and literary theorists. The first section studies how Enlightenment thinkers were submitted to censorship, in particular the German Spinozists, Pierre Bayle, and the French Encylopedists. The second section on the institutional aspects of censorship contains an analysis of the breakdown of censorship in England around 1640 and a discussion of the impact of censorship on philosophy in the Netherlands. The final section studies the stand three Enlightenment thinkers, namely John Toland, Denis Diderot, and G. W. Leibniz, took on the issue of censorship.
Author : Randy Robertson
Publisher : Penn State Press
Page : 290 pages
File Size : 41,73 MB
Release : 2015-10-20
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0271036559
Censorship profoundly affected early modern writing. Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England offers a detailed picture of early modern censorship and investigates the pressures that censorship exerted on seventeenth-century authors, printers, and publishers. In the 1600s, Britain witnessed a civil war, the judicial execution of a king, the restoration of his son, and an unremitting struggle among crown, parliament, and people for sovereignty and the right to define “liberty and property.” This battle, sometimes subtle, sometimes bloody, entailed a struggle for the control of language and representation. Robertson offers a richly detailed study of this “censorship contest” and of the craft that writers employed to outflank the licensers. He argues that for most parties, victory, not diplomacy or consensus, was the ultimate goal. This book differs from most recent works in analyzing both the mechanics of early modern censorship and the poetics that the licensing system produced—the forms and pressures of self-censorship. Among the issues that Robertson addresses in this book are the workings of the licensing machinery, the designs of art and obliquity under a regime of censorship, and the involutions of authorship attendant on anonymity.
Author : Robert Darnton
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 233 pages
File Size : 45,66 MB
Release : 2011-03-15
Category : History
ISBN : 0674059271
Listen to "An Electronic Cabaret: Paris Street Songs, 1748–50" for songs from Poetry and the PoliceAudio recording copyright © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. In spring 1749, François Bonis, a medical student in Paris, found himself unexpectedly hauled off to the Bastille for distributing an “abominable poem about the king.” So began the Affair of the Fourteen, a police crackdown on ordinary citizens for unauthorized poetry recitals. Why was the official response to these poems so intense? In this captivating book, Robert Darnton follows the poems as they passed through several media: copied on scraps of paper, dictated from one person to another, memorized and declaimed to an audience. But the most effective dispersal occurred through music, when poems were sung to familiar tunes. Lyrics often referred to current events or revealed popular attitudes toward the royal court. The songs provided a running commentary on public affairs, and Darnton brilliantly traces how the lyrics fit into song cycles that carried messages through the streets of Paris during a period of rising discontent. He uncovers a complex communication network, illuminating the way information circulated in a semi-literate society. This lucid and entertaining book reminds us of both the importance of oral exchanges in the history of communication and the power of “viral” networks long before our internet age.
Author : Lisa Jane Graham
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 346 pages
File Size : 15,31 MB
Release : 2000
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780813919270
In May 1758, a bailiff named Jean Moriceau de La Motte was arrested for carrying seditious flyers and uttering mauvais discours against Louis XV. When he was questioned at the Bastille over the next several months, La Motte was unequivocal in his loyalty to the king, but his insistence failed to convince the police and probably hurt his case more than would have a simple admission of guilt. He was sentenced to be hanged on the Place de Grève after making his amends on the steps of Nôtre Dame. His punishment seemed severe, if not unwarranted, to an increasingly literate and informed Parisian populace that found censorship hard to support, either theoretically or practically, in the face of intellectual and cultural changes wrought by the Enlightenment. By looking at the police files for cases such as La Motte's, Lisa Jane Graham uncovers fascinating clues to the conflicting attitudes of eighteenth-century French subjects toward royal authority. Individuals like La Motte often failed to see the subversive implications of their words and protested their fidelity to the king in impassioned language. The crown's inability or refusal to accommodate a wider range of political speech turned the opinions of these indivduals into bitter grievances and sometimes crimes. Ironically, the decision to repress seditious speech not only alienated essentially loyal French men and women; by marking them as opponents of monarchical authority, it strengthened their sense of their own autonomy and legitimacy as social actors. The complex and surprising web of motivations lying at the heart of such loyalty, as revealed in the police files Graham examines, undermines some deeply rooted assumptions about the Enlightenment and its links to modernity. Graham's book presents the eighteenth century as the critical historical moment for studying how the premodern virtue of loyalty gave way to new ideas and vocabularies about the relationship between individuals and government. If the King Only Knew attests to the powerful emotional and ideological conflicts this difficult transition unleashed.
Author : Ronan Deazley
Publisher : Open Book Publishers
Page : 438 pages
File Size : 32,76 MB
Release : 2010
Category : Law
ISBN : 190692418X
What can and can't be copied is a matter of law, but also of aesthetics, culture, and economics. The act of copying, and the creation and transaction of rights relating to it, evokes fundamental notions of communication and censorship, of authorship and ownership - of privilege and property. This volume conceives a new history of copyright law that has its roots in a wide range of norms and practices. The essays reach back to the very material world of craftsmanship and mechanical inventions of Renaissance Italy where, in 1469, the German master printer Johannes of Speyer obtained a five-year exclusive privilege to print in Venice and its dominions. Along the intellectual journey that follows, we encounter John Milton who, in his 1644 Areopagitica speech 'For the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing', accuses the English parliament of having been deceived by the 'fraud of some old patentees and monopolizers in the trade of bookselling' (i.e. the London Stationers' Company). Later revisionary essays investigate the regulation of the printing press in the North American colonies as a provincial and somewhat crude version of European precedents, and how, in the revolutionary France of 1789, the subtle balance that the royal decrees had established between the interests of the author, the bookseller, and the public, was shattered by the abolition of the privilege system. Contributions also address the specific evolution of rights associated with the visual and performing arts. These essays provide essential reading for anybody interested in copyright, intellectual history and current public policy choices in intellectual property. The volume is a companion to the digital archive Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900), funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC): www.copyrighthistory.org.
