Description: This volume explores literary censorship from 1660 to 1820 and examines the relationship between pervasive literary modes of the long eighteenth century and the control of seditious libel and punishment in the public pillory.
Review Quotes: "The study derives a substantial part of its vitality from the way in which it includes, alongside the big names, obscure political pamphlets such as Nero the Second, 'What Makes a Libel', and Isaac Dalton's Shift Shifted. Riveting, also, is its analysis of the pillory in visual culture, starting from Cromwellian woodcuts to Victorian illustrations by William Hogarth and Eyre Crowe ... Ultimately Poetics of the Pillory is a crucial study, particularly for our times, as social media platforms resurrect the pillory digitally, while governmental surveillance and censorship reach a crescendo in the developing as well as the developed world." -- Doyeeta Majumder, Modern Lanuage Review
"For Thomas Keymer in his beautifully detailed history, such strategies of evasion are one of the things that make seditious literary texts worth reading, forms of energetic 'creativity and rhetorical complexity' for which, perhaps counterintuitively, we have the early modern political state to thank." -- Clare Bucknell, London Review of Books"There is a wealth of learning here." -- Los Angeles Review of Books"...a major addition to the well-established critical discussion about the links between literature and censorship." -- Paul Keen, Eighteenth-Century Fiction"Armed against any Whiggish optimism, Keymer traces the flexible boundary between literature and law across more than a century and a half with exceptional deftness--a huge amount of material has been digested and arranged here so as to be read with great ease and enjoyment. . . . A whole series of major authors emerge from Keymer's study in a fresh perspective--Dryden, Andrew Marvell, Pope, Daniel Defoe, Fielding, Johnson, and most strikingly Robert Southey. This is a book of the first importance." -- David Womersley, Studies in English Literature"Thomas Keymer's excellent new book is a combined history and critical study of the ways in which conditions of censorship shaped English literature during the long eighteenth century (1660-1820). The book began life as the Clarendon Lectures given at the University of Oxford in 2014-15; these have been expanded with rich archival and critical detail, without sacrificing the energy and lucidity of the lectures." -- Niall Allsopp, Seventeenth-Century News