The constitution of literature : literacy, democracy, and early English literary criticism

Summary: "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."--BOOK JACKET.