Privacy : concealing the eighteenth-century self /

A book entitled Privacy would seem particularly apt for current disorientation about the subject. On the one hand, "reality" shows infest television with obsessive revealing of the traditionally most private thoughts and actions. On the other, concerns abound about invasion of privacy through technological access to almost unlimited information. The tension between personal privacy and civil engagement--recently explored by Robert D. Putnam in Bowling Alone (CH, Dec'00)--is another part of the mix. One of the most satisfying and informed of literary critics, Spacks (University of Virginia) provides a look at psychological privacy that is both a thoughtful examination of the nature and history of privacy and a masterful piece of literary criticism. The book proceeds somewhat episodically through a sequence of topical explorations: (privacy and) reading, sensibility, cultural conventions and dissimulation, sex, and personal revelation. Her focus on privacy allows her to provide fine critical readings of literary works by 18th-century writers like Richardson, Henry and Sarah Fielding, Sterne, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen, along with poetry, diaries, autobiography, and pornography. ^BSumming Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates and above. H. Benoist Our Lady of the Lake University of San Antonio