Why Literature—not the People—Rose

Abstract

The past decade of literary study witnessed a host of arguments concerning the making of the English canon and the rise of Literature with a capital “L.” From changing reading habits to the displacement of religion, from an expansion of print to a “disciplinary” displacement of philosophy, eighteenth-century critics have posited a variety of answers to the question of how and why literature rose when it did.¹ In one sense, this may be a continuation of a trend in eighteenth-century studies particularly, one whereby critics chart the rise of this or that in eighteenth-century Britain: the novel, the public sphere, the people, the domestic woman, liberalism, capitalism, civility, literature. But in another sense, it marks a critical self-consciousness about the profession itself, one that seeks to answer for the present crises of the discipline.²

…The cause of the people and the cause of the government, who are represented as thus anxious to suborn their creatures to write against the people, are not the same but the reverse of one another.

William Hazlitt, “What is the People?” (1818)