Paradise Lost as a Secret History

In The Secret History of Domesticity, Michael McKeon provides a new account of the development of the aesthetic in the eighteenth century. He characterizes the contribution of debates about neoclassical dramatic theory to the division of knowledge into the categories of science and art when they separate the pleasures of the understanding from the pleasures of the imagination. Unlike other accounts of the aesthetic that treat 18th‐century theatricality as a metaphor, McKeon’s use of drama theory mediates between metaphorical theatricality and literal theater history. By emphasizing the emergent epistemological divide between arts and science, however, McKeon does not fully exploit one of the consequences that may flow from giving this importance to drama theory: the location of aesthetics beside commerce or entertainment. To recognize the persistence of drama theory in literature even after the crystallization of the realist novel in the 1740s, moreover, might also generate an alternative history of the novel to the one provided in The Secret History.

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confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Drama Theory, the Division of Knowledge, and the Emergence of the Aesthetic

Frank¹

2012

Public Learning and Private Learners: The Separation of Public and Private in Renaissance Literature and Pedagogy

Carlson

2012

Although Michael McKeon’s The Secret History of Domesticity is both a major achievement in public sphere theory and builds a major bridge between studies of the Restoration and the Renaissance, it also suggests a further examination of evidence from before the civil wars. While the opening chapter considers the pre‐16th‐century developments of privacy in politics, economics and religion, the book’s literary and cultural evidence focuses overwhelmingly on the 17th and 18th centuries. Taking the topic of education as the main point of departure, this article argues that the conceptual separation of public and private can be seen in Tudor evidence such as Richard Mulcaster’s pedagogy manual, Positions (1581), Dudley Fenner’s Artes of Logike and Rhethorike (1584) and even in the statutes of London’s Gresham College (1596). Although the language of public and private in these texts is inchoate and provisional, these Elizabethan educational texts also participate in what McKeon identifies as the emergence of the modern categories of publicity and privacy.

Public and Private Worlds? Social History, Gender and Space

Williamson

2012

Michael McKeon’s The Secret History of Domesticity is an important contribution to cultural and literary history, exploring how concepts of public and private evolved. His quest to uncover the ‘division of knowledge’ takes the reader on a journey through the low and high culture of literary genre, the history of print, art, architecture, entertainment, politics and social theory. This essay compares McKeon’s reading of public and private in light of the recent ‘spatial turn’ in social and gender history. The ‘spatial turn’ offers a close lens into the lived experience of past peoples in the same way that McKeon claims to recover the tacit knowledge embedded in the consciousness of past societies. The difference between the approaches is less about their conclusions, but their sources and methodology. Taken together they offer something that each alone cannot, a broad portrayal of a society from above and below, from the past and the present. In which case, there can be great value in placing cultural readings of the past, like Secret History, alongside social methodologies to draw together the experiences of people at all levels of society. In this article, I therefore argue for the inclusion of these contrasting and complimentary approaches to concepts of public and private within the framework of debate for Secret History.