Volume 24, Number 15 · September 29, 1977
Porn, Propaganda, and the Enlightenment
By C.B.A. Behrens
The Widening Circle: Essays on the Circulation of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Europe
by Robert Darnton, by Bernhard Fabian, by Roy McKeen Wiles, edited by Paul J. Korshin
University of Pennsylvania Press, 204 pp., $15.00
Priest and Parish in Eighteenth-Century France: A Social and Political Study of the Curés in the Diocese of Dauphiné, 1750-1791
by Timothy Tackett
Princeton University Press, 368 pp., $19.50
Lafayette: A Biography
by Peter Buckman
Paddington Press, 288 pp., $10.00
In The Widening Circle, a collection of three essays on the reading public in England, France, and Germany respectively in the eighteenth century, Bernhard Fabian, the author of the essay on Germany, quotes a classification of 'habitual readers' that was made in 1799 by the German romantic novelist known as Jean Paul. 'In Germany,' Jean Paul said, 'there are three publics or publica: (1) the general, almost uneducated and unlearned of the lending libraries; (2) the learned consisting of professors, candidates, students, and reviewers; and (3) the educated, which is composed of men of the world and educated women, of artists and the higher classes educated at least through social intercourse and travel. (There are certainly frequent interrelations between these three publics.)'
Review, 3081 words
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