Title
The Widening Circle: Essays on the Circulation of Literature in EighteenthCentury Europe (Anniversary Collection),Used
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Three distinguished authorities offer informed reflections on the history of books, on literary commerce, and on the reading public in eighteenthcentury England, France, and Germany. Concerned with an area of study that has gone largely unexploredthe social function of the book trade and the various agencies of distributionRobert Darnton. Roy M. Wiles, and Bernhard Fabian lay the groundwork for the intellectual, social, and literary historian as well as the student of political revolutions.Robert Darnton's rich account of a clandestine book dealer expands our knowledge of the actual habits of eighteenthcentury Frenchmen. We learn about the livres philosophiques, as they were known in the tradeobscene. irreligious. or seditious works; about the intricate circuit of agents linking publisher and bookdealer; and about a confidence game often surviving on sheer bravura. Darnton not only gives us a general sense of the literary tastes in a small provincial city in France on the eve of the Revolution but also opens the way toward an understanding of the country's entire literary underground.The late Roy M. Wiles investigates the principal readership in eighteenthcentury England and demonstrates that intellectual activities were not confined to polite society in London. Employing new, often untouched materialsnewspaper circulation and delivery figures, book lists and advertisements in London and local papers, subscription books in provincial towns and citiesWiles helps dispel some of the uncertainty surrounding the question of literacy and shows that, in fact, what the provincial readers chose to read more accurately registers the eighteenth century's relish for reading than those books considered by Londoners as 'required' reading.Bernhard Fabian explores the sources that permit us to assess the circulation of English letters in Germany during the second half of the eighteenth century. By considering the kind of information obtained from subscription lists, by studying the relation of English literature to the general reader of the period, and by examining the emergence of a reading public that actually read English, Fabian helps delineate a broad view of the contemporary reading scene in eighteenthcentury Germany.
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