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Spheres of Influence. Intellectual and Cultural Publics from Shakespeare to Habermas

Spheres of Influence. Intellectual and Cultural Publics from Shakespeare to Habermas

Publié le par Gabriel Marcoux-Chabot (Source : Peter Lang Publishing Group website)


Alex BENCHIMOL et Willy MALEY, Spheres of Influence. Intellectual and Cultural Publics from Shakespeare to Habermas, Oxford / Bern / Berlin / Bruxelles / Francfort-sur-le-Main /  New York / Vienne, Peter Lang, 2007, 333 p.
ISBN 978-3-03910-539-7
US-ISBN 978-0-8204-7542-4


SUMMARY

This book explores the ways in which intellectual and cultural publicsfrom the early modern period to the postmodern present have activelyconstructed their cultural identities within the social processes ofmodernity. It brings together some of the most compelling recentwriting on the public sphere by scholars in the fields of literaryhistory, cultural studies and social theory from both sides of theAtlantic. Taken together, the essays in this collection offer a majorre-examination of recent scholarship on the theory of the public sphereas developed by Jürgen Habermas. They also stand as a collective effortboth to interrogate and to extend this influential model by exploringmodern forms of intellectual and cultural activity in all their richdiversity and ideological complexity. Contributions range from thedivided inheritance of Shakespeare publishing history to the new formsof mass-mediated cultural experience in contemporary Britain; fromattempts at cultural regulation in the literary public sphere of theRomantic period to the postmodern political conflict played out in theAmerican public sphere of the 1990s; and from varieties of religiousdissent to modes of postcolonial criticism. The book furthers thedialogue between academic methodologies, fields and periods, andpresents readers with a contested narrative of the key cultural andintellectual practices that have made up our modern world.


CONTENTS

Alex BENCHIMOL and Willy MALEY, « Introduction: circling the public sphere »

Joad RAYMOND : « Perfect speech: the public sphere and communication inseventeenth-century England »

Thomas N. CORNS: « The contested spheres ofCivil War radicalism: camps, common land and congregations »

Andrew MURPHY: « Publicizing Shakespeare: the canonical text and the publicsphere »

Alex BENCHIMOL: « Cultural historiography and the ScottishEnlightenment public sphere: placing Habermas in eighteenth-centuryEdinburgh »

Paul KEEN: « When is a public sphere not a public sphere?:Thoughts from 1795-1796 »

Jon MEE: « Policing enthusiasm in the romanticperiod: literary periodicals and the 'rational' public sphere »

Craig CALHOUN and Michael McQUARRIE: « Public discourse and political experience:T.J. Wooler and transformations of the public sphere in earlynineteenth-century Britain »

Jim McGUIGAN: « The cultural public sphere »

Nancy FRASER: « Politics, culture, and the public sphere: toward apostmodern conception »

Willy MALEY: « Peripheral vision: black publicintellectuals and the postcolonial paradigm »


ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Alex Benchimol received his BA in English and History from the College of Wooster in 1992, his MPhil in Media and Culture from the University of Glasgow in 1994 and his MA in English from the University of Toronto in 1996. He completed his doctorate at the University of Glasgow in 2001. Dr. Benchimol currently teaches in the Department of English Literature at the University of Glasgow, Scotland.

Willy Maley is Professor of Renaissance Studies in the Department of English Literature at the University of Glasgow. He received his BA in English from the University of Strathclyde in 1985 and his PhD in English from the University of Cambridge in 1990.