Scandal Nation - by Kathryn Temple (Hardcover)

About the Book

Kathryn Temple argues that eighteenth-century Grub Street scandals involving print piracy, forgery, and copyright violation played a crucial role in the formation of British identity. Britain's expanding print culture demanded new ways of thinking...

Book Synopsis

Kathryn Temple argues that eighteenth-century Grub Street scandals involving print piracy, forgery, and copyright violation played a crucial role in the formation of British identity. Britain's expanding print culture demanded new ways of thinking about business and art. In this environment, print scandals functioned as sites where national identity could be contested even as it was being formed.Temple draws upon cases involving Samuel Richardson, Samuel Johnson, Catharine Macaulay, and Mary Prince. The public uproar around these controversies crossed class, gender, and regional boundaries, reaching the Celtic periphery and the colonies. Both print and spectacle, both high and low, these scandals raised important points of law, but also drew on images of criminality and sexuality made familiar in the theater, satirical prints, broadsides, even in wax museums. Like print culture itself, the "scandal" of print disputes constituted the nation--and resistance to its formation. Print transgression destabilized both the print industry and efforts to form national identity. Temple concludes that these scandals represent print's escape from Britain's strenuous efforts to enlist it in the service of nation.

Review Quotes

An impressively wide-ranging but essentially high-minded account of the relationship between literary authorship, law, and the development of English national identity in the latter half of the eighteenth century.... Temple's main concern is to show how certain high-profile cases of piracy, infringement of privacy, authorial copyright and literary libel helped shaped English 'authority, ' balancing the relative claims of writers and readers, men and women, literary and oral culture, nation and empire.

Temple offers some intriguing ideas about how anxiety over textual 'piracy' has resurfaced as anxiety over globalized, digital, or electronic 'piracy' today.... This book offers many interesting insights into Englishness, Britishness, gender, and authorship from 1750 to 1832.

This interesting book deserves considerable attention, and it would be worth considering how far the method could also be extended to other publications and aspects of media culture.

About the Author

Kathryn Temple is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University.