Shifting the Boundaries Transformation of the Languages of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century

This is a collection of interdisciplinary essays dealing with the problematic boundaries between the public and private spheres in Western Europe (Britain, France and Germany in particular) in the eighteenth century. The book mounts a challenge to the notion of a clear distinction between public and private and attempts to account for the mobility of the many boundaries between the two. The first essay introduces some of those problematic boundaries in the light of the influential studies of Habermas, Koselleck, Aries and Chartier, who together have helped shape our understanding of the formation of the modern public and private spheres. A number of essays deal with the nature of public opinion in relation to state control and with the role of the intelligentsia. Some investigate non-political forms of sociability and the creation of various kinds of publics within the cultural realm. Others scrutinize gender roles and the validity of the accepted correspondence of male/female to public/private in the light of women's use of the printed word. Others reconstruct the way in which the more self-conscious perceptions of the boundaries between public and private contributed to make this one of the central dichotomies of modern life. The various trends are drawn together in a Postscript.