This book offers a reassessment of radical writing in the late Enlightenment by examining the construction of a provocative authorial posture. It focuses on French and British writers who confronted the authorities as self-proclaimed outsiders, presented their authentic personalities to their readers, and boasted of their own political importance. This posture, and focus of the volume, was possible against the backdrop of an eighteenth-century media revolution that gave print a new presence in many people’s daily lives. To stage protests, create scandals, and encourage political mobilisation, radical writers interacted with a growing and ever-curious audience consuming a variety of printed goods. Radical writing and the media revolution in the late Enlightenment features in-depth case studies of writers such as John Horne Tooke and Olympe de Gouges, among others. It also provides a systematic analysis of typical rhetorical gestures and paratextual forms that were frequently used to create a provocative posture. Finally, this study reconstructs contemporary anxieties about popular writers that have been largely overlooked by scholarship. Indeed, many proponents of the Enlightenment worried that emotions and entertainment were taking over public debate. Rather than siding for or against radical writing and the media revolution, this book uses these critical reactions to re-emphasise the ambivalence of popular politics in the late Enlightenment.
Table of Contents
| Acknowledgements |
| List of illustrations |
| Preliminary note on quotations and references |
| Introduction |
| Overture: what is the Enlightenment public? |
| I. Personal protest |
| 1. La Chalotais goes public (1766-1767) |
| 2. Persecution narratives and intimate communication |
| 3. The outsider and the citizen: claims for civil rights |
| II. Polemical activism |
| 1. Horne Tooke and the murder incident (1775-1777) |
| 2. The politics of fire: polemical writing and political scandal |
| 3. Free press incidents and the contested meaning of critical writing |
| III. Moral commitment |
| 1. Clarkson’s journey and the making of the British anti-slavery writer (1769-1808) |
| 2. Under the influence of humanitarian emotions: the moral self and its readers |
| 3. Conflicts about the modalities of campaigning |
| IV. Popular authority |
| 1. Linguet’s journalism and its public debated by the Enlightenment (around 1780) |
| 2. New ambitions and new positions |
| 3. The powers of popularity and the problem of the public |
| V. Equal expression |
| 1. Olympe de Gouges’s queer pamphleteering (1788-1793) |
| 2. Print pluralism: women, people of colour, religious minorities |
| 3. The amazon problem and its appropriation |
| Conclusion: light or fire? |
| Bibliography |
| Archival sources |
| Edited sources |
| Printed sources |
| Secondary works |
