"This is an important revisionist account of the birth of literary criticism in the eighteenth century. Morrissey takes on the long-unquestioned connection between democracy and criticism, arguing that we have not fully examined its historical basis. I could not agree with him more. Understanding the literary constitution of our field in its mixed investments and inherent traditionalisms can only make us better readers, and maybe better citizens, too." —Julia Lupton, University of California, Irvine

"Morrissey offers a convincing challenge to Jurgen Habermas's concept of the public sphere—a concept that suffuses hundreds of books and thousands of dissertations on early modern and 18th-century literature, criticism, periodicals, readership, authorship, and book history Rather than assuming the printed word was 'stable,' Johnson, Morrissey contends, took pains to give it stability. This is an exciting argument." —CHOICE

Lee Morrissey is Professor of English at Clemson University. He is the author of From the Temple to the Castle: An Architectural History of British Literature, 1660-1760 (1999) and the editor of Debating the Canon: A Reader, from Addison to Nafisi (2005).